Ding! 50!

It took me 6 months, but I have finally leveled a character in SWTOR to 50, the current max level. Here she is, my new level 50 Jedi Sage:

Yipee!

To commemorate this event, I thought I'd share some screen shots from my adventures (excuse the low quality video settings--my computer system isn't that great). Cue the nostalgic music...

Overlooking the sarlacc pit

Reenacting The Lion King. If only I could have zoomed out more, it would be clearer that I'm on a narrow rock outcropping.

Speeder surfing (a fun glitch I got once)

My pet orokeet races to keep up with my speeder, like in that imprinted duckling video

Tattooine's twin suns

I loved Alderaan, especially for those sweeping thranta rides.

Wheeeee!

Reclining in the Alderaan palace throne room. I could get used to this.

Upon reaching level 40 (and all levels other than 50), the achievement was greeted by droids carrying a banner that says "Congratulations" (in this shot, it actually says "tulations con", but just picture it scrolling). Not sure why they thought level 50 deserved less celebration.

Hoth: cold, but in some places strikingly beautiful.

Lightsabers are great, but sometimes you need a big gun.

Portrait shot of my Sage on the bridge of her ship, from the load screen

I still haven't finished my class storyline--two more planets to go, I think. Then there are all the hardmode flashpoints and operations to improve my gear and hone my skills. No rest for the Jedi. But it has been, and continues to be, a fun, exciting journey.

Choosing my SWTOR legacy name

I finally powered through Alderaan with my Consular to unlock my Legacy, but now that I've done it I'm paralyzed by indecsion. Legacy is a feature in SWTOR that, once unlocked by finishing Chapter 1 with one of your characters, allows you to choose a surname that will be shared by all your characters on that server. In the future, other benefits for gaining legacy points will be available, but for the moment, it's just the simple name. If only it were actually simple.

I didn't have too much trouble thinking of first names for the various characters I've created in SWTOR. After so many years of playing games, I have some favorite old standards, plus I made up a few new names for this game. But a last name that will be shared by all my characters? That's not something I've had to think of before. The fact that it's permanent and all my future characters (on that server) will bear the name as well makes it rather intimidating.

What sort of name do I choose? Names from Star Wars canon are forbidden, though many will make it past the filter and then it's just a matter of whether or not you get reported or caught. I saw someone walking around with the last name Onasi, a clear reference to KotOR's Carth Onasi. I wonder if that person had to change it yet. It could be kind of fun to effectively write yourself into a Star Wars lineage, be either an ancestor of someone from the movies or descendent of someone from KotOR, but I don't think I'd want to risk being reported and forced to change it (or, worse, reassigned some other name without any say in it).

How about references to other fiction? Maybe a last name from another sci-fi franchise? I've seen a Greyjoy walking around the space station, plus someone named Zoey Washburne (sic). Names from popular culture or media are also forbidden by the Rules of Conduct, but I don't know where they'd draw the line. Is Greyjoy somehow obscure enough that no one cares? Zoey Washburne is obviously a reference, but the last name Washburne itself probably wouldn't be ruled out if used alone. It's a real surname, after all.

I could always make up a name. But would I go the "Nounverber" route, a la Skywalker? It's right there in Star Wars canon, but it can also seem cheesy. In general, I look down on this option as the cheap way out, but I can't deny that sometimes, it just sounds really cool. Or should I just completely create my own made-up name, one that's gibberish but sounds good?

This is what my brainstorming has come up with so far: If I go with a sci-fi reference, I might choose the name Serra. It sounds good with the various first names of my characters, and as long as I don't name any of them Inara, it's not an obvious reference--it's a real surname. Another idea that at least amuses me is the name Schwartz. A legit last name that has special meaning for Space Balls fans. Unfortunately, it doesn't really suit my characters, somehow. It would seem out of place. If I want to do a nounverber, I kind of like the sound of Stardiver*, combining a space-related word with something ocean related, which suits me. And if I completely make up a name... Well, I'm still thinking on that!

Of course, legacy names are unique in each server, so if someone else from my server already has any of these names, then I'd have to adjust accordingly. I should also mention that legacy names can be displayed two ways: as a last name (e.g. Master Eleni NAME), or as a subtitle under the name (e.g. Master Eleni/The NAME Legacy). So if I chose Serra, I'd probably use it as a last name. But I'd probably choose the second option for The Schwartz Legacy.

Anyone have any suggestions? If you're a SWTOR player, what legacy name did/will you choose?

* Edit: Stardiver has already fallen out of favor. I realized it might make me sound like an Olympic diving champion or something. Didn't like that. Need a new idea now.

Update: I finally did choose a legacy name, and I actually went with an old standard naming method of mine that I didn't mention in this post. I won't say what it is, but it is related to my name "Eleni" and is meant to translate (sort of) to "Star Fire".

My SWTOR experience so far

Thanks to Star Wars: The Old Republic, my blog posting since December has been pretty sparse. Since it has been sucking up so much of my free time, I figured I might as well do a post talking about my experience in game so far. And of course I want to show off my toons.

I am leveling two characters side by side. One is a Guardian--an advanced class of the Jedi Knight--whom I play as a tank alongside my brother's Gunslinger (Smuggler advanced class) who does DPS. I was a little upset about this arrangement at first. I kind of thought I'd be a Jedi Sentinel--TWO LIGHTSABERS!!!!1!--but since my brother had already become a Gunslinger, it didn't make sense for us both to be pure DPS classes. So I chose Guardian. But why did he get his first choice class, while I had to choose one to complement him? Not fair! I still feel a pang of jealousy when someone walks by with two lightsabers, but I really like the Guardian skills and play style, and may even like it more than I would have liked Sentinel (hard to know without trying it out, though). Force Push just feels right--it's what Jedi are supposed to do. Here she is:



I have to say, though, that I really miss her hair. There are low level (~level 10) Guardian armors that have no hood, or wear the hood down, but after that, unless you're a Twi'lek, you have a hood up all the time. And hair doesn't animate under it--that would be too complicated (clipping is hard!). It's pretty low on the developers' list to implement a toggle hood on/off option, but I don't see why they couldn't just put in a couple pieces of mod-able hood down robes. After all, Twi'leks always have their hoods down, so they have the necessary designs already in the game. Ah well. Maybe some day I'll see my cute hair cut again.

My second character is a Sage, an advanced class of the Jedi Consular. She is a caster who really only uses her lightsaber to deflect attacks, something I can watch in the animation but not something I actively control. As one Sage on the SWTOR forum put it, "Don't use your lightsaber, except for nighttime reading." I solo her except for flashpoints and Heroic 4 missions. I have her specced for DPS, currently in the Telekinetics tree, but in a few levels I'll probably respec her to be a Balance/Telekinetics hybrid. If you don't play the game (or even specifically a Sage) that probably makes no sense, but if you do, it's an important distinction, trust me) Here she is, with her "Bubble" skill (Force Armor) active:



Both of my characters are currently level 28. It's been slow going, because I have two of them. Also, I haven't been playing quite as much as I would like to, in large part because I feel obligated not to ignore my boyfriend completely. He's so needy ;) Yes, this is the opposite of the stereotypical story of the games-obsessed boyfriend with the unhappy neglected girlfriend... I need to get him playing the game. And I might be able to if it weren't for the fact that his computer is old and can't run it. So I need to buy him a new computer. Anyone know of the cheapest computer that would run SWTOR? Let me know.

Anyway, so far, I love the gameplay. I've never played a game where I've had this many useful skills that I want to have hotkeyed. There just aren't enough keys (I currently have 18 skills hotkeyed, and counting...). But it keeps things varied and fun, and when I use the right skills the right way, it's very rewarding. I've found that I prefer both DPS and healing to tanking (I can't really heal anymore, but when I was lower level my Sage was a passable healer). Still, the better I get at tanking, the more I enjoy it. I also prefer ranged combat to melee, just because I'm kind of awkward and sometimes have trouble running around to find my target, or switching targets to a guy standing in front of me. Much easier just to stand still and hurl attacks at whomever happens to be my current target. For these reasons, I have to say that I prefer playing my Sage to my Guardian, because she's ranged DPS instead of melee tanking. I think I'm a Sage at heart--if I were actually training to be a Jedi in the Old Republic, I'd want to be a Sage.

Now I've said before that this is my first MMO. I played Guild Wars and Hellgate with my brothers, but those weren't true MMOs; you could see other players in the towns/stations and group with them, but once you went out into the combat environments, it would just be you and your small party. In those games, I only ever grouped with my brothers, never with strangers. I was thus a little worried about adjusting to teaming with people in SWTOR. I still haven't joined a guild, and I haven't done too much grouping with other people, but my experience grouping has been mostly positive. I've only had one bad group experience, and it wasn't actually that bad. It wasn't like the people were mean or unpleasant, it was just disappointing. We were already at a disadvantage trying to do the flashpoint with three players and a companion instead of four players, but on top of that, the companion that one player claimed was a tank started healing us (I think he lied), and the other player was three levels lower than the flashpoint. Not a recipe for success. After dying a few times on the first boss, the group leader recruited a Sage who was over 20 levels above us, and he just ran us through. I got some good loot, but it wasn't exactly fun, just confusing and hectic trying to keep up. Oh well.

Other than that, my other group experiences have been really good. Friendly players got together, we each had our roles and did them effectively, and we had challenging but manageable and fun fights. I might join a guild when I get to the end of the game and just want to run operations and pvp, but for now I'm happy as an independent.

The gameplay and team questing are great, but what ultimately drew me to this MMO in particular was the fact that it's a BioWare game and I expected interesting quests and engaging storylines. The stories and quests are not quite on par with Mass Effect (I hold Mass Effect 2 as a paragon of deep story and tough choices), but they're still great. In the non-class quests (which everyone in a faction gets to do), I think it's a little hard to have choices make a noticeable and lasting difference because there's a chance that your choice won't be the one acted upon--all players in a group make a choice, and a random roll decides whose choice "wins". If some other group member's decision had negative consequences you had to deal with throughout the game, it would discourage group play, and that would be bad. So I understand the issue there. Still, the quests are varied enough that they don't just feel like a list of chores (kill 10 X, collect 6 Y, etc.).

There are a lot of side quests in this game, but I'm currently mainly interested in getting deeper into the class storylines. At the very beginning, on their starting planet of Tython, I preferred the Knight's storyline to the Consular's. However, since leaving Tython, I think I've started to prefer the Consular storyline. Maybe they're about equal. This is all personal preference, really. All of the class quests are very different--they even had different writers--so you're definitely going to have some better than others. But that assessment is largely subjective.

Of the five class storylines that I'm familiar with (in addition to Knight and Consular, I've tagged along on my brother's Smuggler quests, plus I played a Sith Inquisitor in beta alongside my brother's Sith Warrior), the Inquisitor story is my favorite. I only played through the prologue, but it was really, really fun the whole way through. I don't usually like playing as a "bad guy", which is why I ultimately started playing as Jedi, but I'm looking forward to going back to the Inquisitor some time. I loved it. All the other class storylines are good, but just not as cool as the Inquisitor, in my opinion.

I have to share one fun anecdote about the Knight storyline. It's a tiny bit spoilery, but it's only from the end of the prologue (i.e. not very far in the game). And I won't name any names. Still, if you haven't yet played but plan to play a Knight and are sensitive to spoilers, you've been warned (skip to the second paragraph after the screen shot).

At the end of the prologue, you are attacked by a Sith Lord and have no choice but to kill him. He was a haughty (and evil) jerk, so after we killed him, my brother and I celebrated with a happy dance (our companions Kira and Corso were somewhat less enthused):

Here's the kicker: We had interrupted this Sith Lord in the middle of a holoconference with a few Darths, one of whom happened to be his father. Yes, we killed a Darth's son as he watched helplessly through the holo, and then we danced about it while he was forced to stand there and wait for us to come over to talk to him (so we could hear his livid threats). Surprisingly, we didn't earn any Dark Side points for this. You have to feel kind of bad for him, but... c'mon, he's an evil Sith! It was pretty hilarious.

Some other favorite moments in the game so far:
The other night, my Consular briefly got to impersonate a Sith Lord. Fun, different, quite amusing, and I even earned some affection points with Qyzen, my companion. Good stuff.

My favorite quest so far was the series of missions for the Gree Droids on Coruscant. I loved these quests just because of the quest givers, the droids, because of the way they talk. Apparently Gree senses place a particular emphasis on shapes and colors, and their speech patterns reflect this. They're also a fairly remote species, so their droids' translations are not ideal. Here's a video of them talking. Just listen for a minute or so, you'll get the idea:

I remember at first being so confused: I could follow along OK, and then suddenly the droid would say something about an orange sphere or red perpendicular. After a while, though, I got used to their patterns of speech, which was a true, satisfying pleasure. I thought it was cool that even in a galaxy with universal translators, there can still be language barriers. I've earned other titles for my characters, but I still proudly bear the "Black Bisector" title.

Well, I've rambled on long enough for now. Until my next SWTOR update, may red tangents envelop you as you descry multitudinous purple parallels.

Shit Geeky Girls Say...

Last week, I came across this awesome video in which Toria (The Toria Show) tells us all the shit geek girls say. It's hilariously true.



She explains that this is all stuff she says, but she assumes other geeky girls may say similar things. She's right. I don't partake in all the realms of geekdom that she references (e.g. comic books, Doctor Who), but enough of these resonated for me that I was laughing very hard.

Yes, female armor is so much skimpier than male armor! I couldn't believe it in SWTOR when my Jedi had heavy armor that left her with a bare midriff. Ridiculous! Then there's the slave girl outfit (luckily only counts as light armor). Obligatory, I suppose. But I've yet to find the slave male outfit.

Picard, hands down!

RPG > FPS.

I'm usually pretty decisive about hair color, but the eye spacing... That's a tricky one. You don't want to spend the whole game thinking "I should have gone one tick closer" every time you see your character's face!

In Baldur's Gate, I definitely did give my fighter/thief more charisma than she needed. I wanted people to like me! What's wrong with that?

I showed this video to my boyfriend, to get a sense of what I really do say vs. just think silently to myself. He laughed particularly hard at the "My character is awesome!" line, and when she sings the Lord of the Rings Shire theme, plus the bit from "Still Alive". I sing those a LOT.

The funniest bit for me, though, came right at the beginning. "Did I ever tell you I speak Elvish?" The day I saw this video, earlier that morning I had just told a friend of mine that I speak (a little) Elvish. GET OUT OF MY HEAD, TORIA!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone!

I've been a bit absent from this blog lately. Blame it on SWTOR. Actually, most of the blame goes to my spending two weeks of winter break at my parents' house in Massachusetts. I was hoping to get my yearly dose of snow, but no luck this year. Aside from the lightest of light snow for maybe 15 minutes on Christmas morning (enough isolated snowflakes so you're pretty sure it's snow instead of ash or pollen, but not any more than that), and one similarly brief though slightly heavier flurry another evening, the Boston area was snow free for those two weeks. A couple of the days were even surprisingly warm (50s F, 10-15 C)--though still freezing by Hawaii standards, I suppose. I thought maybe we'd spend New Year's on the mountain in Vermont, where there is more reliably snow (see my sledding video from two years ago), but we decided our 15 1/2-year-old dog wouldn't be able to make it up to my uncle's cabin.

Even without snow, I had a great time. I get along really well with my brothers, who were both there. We played a lot of board games, actually: Battlestar Galactica, Dominion with both the Intrigue and Prosperity expansions, 7 Wonders, and Pandemic. All fun and different games. I was new to 7 Wonders (each player gets to be a civilization responsible for one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, gathering and trading resources, building their cities and their Wonder to earn points) and Pandemic (cooperative game in which each player has a special role in a team fighting the outbreak of four highly contagious diseases around the world), and I'd never played Dominion with any expansions, so it was challenging but exciting to learn new games.

We also watched the entire first season of Community, which I'd never seen before. I'm not a fan of Chevy Chase, but luckily he's not exactly a likeable character on the show, so I didn't mind it so much. And the paintball episode is EPIC! So awesome. I hear there are some other epic episodes in Season 2, so I'm looking forward to catching up on those.

I have been playing a fair bit of SWTOR, though I'm switching between two mains (a Sage and a Guardian), which is slowing me down. It makes sense because I wanted one character that I could pair with my brother's Gunslinger and one that I could solo, but it hasn't exactly worked as smoothly as I'd hoped. But I'm settling into the characters now. Once we finish the main stories with our first characters, we'll start with Imperial characters--I have an Inquisitor and Agent ready to go. There are just too many good choices to stick with just one.

I'm back in Hawaii, now, and enjoying the warm weather. I like having some winter, but it's nice to have fresh air and birdsong coming through the windows, the warm breeze carrying scents of tropical flowers. Nice until I have to go back into work.

I'm planning on holding a giveaway soon! Though I'm still caught up in SWTOR, I can't forget that Mass Effect 3 is only a couple months away. So I'll be doing a giveaway of one of my N7 bracelets. For non-Mass Effect fans, I'll probably do a giveaway of a beaded bracelet with one of my other designs (e.g. R2-D2). For the guys who don't want a bracelet...I'll have to work on that. Anyway, keep an eye out for the giveaway, it'll probably be up in the next week or two once I get it all organized.

In the meantime, I hope your new year has started off well. Best wishes for a happy and complete (...not apocalyptic) 2012!

My Saga Begins!!!

5:25 am, I got my invite to early game access in Star Wars: The Old Republic! Good thing I woke up a bit early so I could play before work. Work really is going to get in the way of my adventuring. Such a nuisance.

I've decided to start with a Jedi Consular, and I'll choose Sage as her advanced class. But I've already created eight characters, so I have many to choose from and switch between. Once my brother gets into the game (he didn't pre-order until some time in the past month, so he'll be getting in later), then I'll be playing other characters with him.

Fun times...

To Read or Not To Read: Revan

Last month, the Star Wars novel Revan by Drew Karpyshyn, set in the era of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, was released. I am torn about whether or not I want to read it. I love KotOR, and I really want to know Revan's story. But at the same time, I'm not sure I could stand to read this book.

The rest of this post will contain MAJOR SPOILERS to the video game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. If you haven't played it already, you're probably never planning on playing it, since it's old. Even so, you should stop reading this post and play it now. It's awesome, and holds a special place in my heart. So go. OK, if you're really sure you don't mind being spoiled, read on, but really, I'm talking about what is one of my all-time favorite plot twists, so I am loathe to spoil it for anyone. Last warning. All right, here we go.



In KotOR, I became very attached to my player character. I imagined an entire origin story for her, building on the meager class-based background provided, which was that she had been a smuggler but was now a soldier for the Republic. My imagined back story basically amounted to the worst kind of trope-filled fan fiction, but I liked it. So, when that fateful moment came on board the Leviathan, and I realized that my imagined back story was just that--imagined--that my character was actually the one-time Darth Revan, her true memories wiped and rewritten by the Jedi, I felt her devastation. My slave-to-smuggler-to-soldier-to-Jedi memories were a sham. I wasn't the noble Jedi I thought I was. The trusting relationships I'd developed with my party members were built on lies. I wasn't sure which was worse--the fact that I had once fallen to the Dark Side and was responsible for a terrible war, or that my present self was a half-fake person, programmed by the Jedi to be their puppet.

At this point in the game, I was so taken aback that I literally stepped back from my computer. My heart was racing and my face was flushed. The metaphysical questions that buzzed through my head right then, and over the course of the next few days, were what made the gaming experience so amazing. Who am I? Am I Revan? Is Revan still a part of my psychology? If I'm not Revan, then who am I? Just a person the Jedi made up? My experiences are programmed--is my behavior programmed, too? Am I any better than a droid? Struggling to answer these questions bonded me with my character. Regardless of whether she was Revan or the the name that I had chosen at character creation or both, I felt a connection with her that is hard to come across in games.

Knights of the Old Republic 2, which featured a different protagonist (known as "the Exile"), left Revan's fate a mystery. Revan went off into the Unknown Regions of the galaxy in search of something that would be a great danger to the galaxy. Did she ever find it? Did she ever return? For a while, I hoped for a KotOR3 to round out the story. Eventually it became apparent that KotOR3 would never happen, as BioWare was planning an MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic, which would take place a few hundred years later. The MMO is awesome, but it's not the conclusion to Revan's story that I was hoping for. So along comes the novel Revan, written by none other than the lead writer on KotOR, promising me the insight into Revan's fate that I so crave. There's only one problem: In the novel, Revan is a man.

Yes, I've known this for a while, but "canonically", Revan is a man. Typical. It's no secret that most video games (the ones that don't have pink covers) are targeted towards young men. Games have male protagonists far more often than female protagonists, so in the cases where the protagonist's gender is chosen by the player, it should only be expected that the "canon" or "default" gender would be male. In the Baldur's Gate novels, Gorion's Ward is a man. Default Shepard and Hawke for the Mass Effect series and Dragon Age 2, respectively, are male; they're the ones featured in the trailers and posters and other promotional materials. It should be no surprise, then, that the person standing front and center on the SWTOR cover is a male Jedi (Note: It may turn out that he's actually an NPC in the game--I haven't played it all yet--but I interpret him to be the hero into whose shoes you the potential buyer are supposed to imagine stepping). I love your female protagonists, BioWare! You should let them out more.

To be fair, the Exile of KotOR2 is actually canonically female. This doesn't make me feel much better for two reasons. First, KotOR2 wasn't BioWare, it was Obsidian, so BioWare--you're still not off the hook. Second, the Exile in the game was constructed in a strange way so that she the character knew things--important things about her past that had major effects on the game's main plot--that I the player did not know. I had to wait for a big reveal towards the end of the game to have someone else tell me what my player character had known all along. Though she was a fascinating character (it turned out, once those NPCs told me), I never was able to connect with her because I felt like I didn't know her. Strangely enough (or not so strangely), KotOR2 is the only game I've ever chosen to play through with a male character (on my second play through). I think it was because of the disconnect that I felt with the protagonist that I was finally able to let go and not have to see myself in the player character.

But it's not just me feeling neglect on behalf of my female Revan (and all those other female protagonists) that makes me wish that Revan had been made canonically female. I actually think it makes the better story. In canon, the male Revan develops a romantic relationship with the Jedi party member Bastila. No offense to anyone who played that romance and liked it--it's your game, after all--but I find that love story totally sketchy. Three reasons why Bastila would not have fallen for the player character:
1) She knew you were Revan. Sure, that means she knows that you were once a great Jedi and a brilliant general, but you also were weak enough to fall to the Dark Side, and once there did terrible things (e.g. started a war against the Republic that has claimed countless lives), before being defeated by the Jedi.
2) Even if she believed that you were different from Revan, that you were changed and a better person now, she'd know that it was all because of how she and the other Jedi had designed you. She'd see you as a sort of fascinating construct. It takes a twisted mind to fall in love with her own creation.
3) She's a Jedi. She was raised to be a Jedi from a very young age. She's lived by the Jedi Code for as long as she can remember. She's always known that love is not in the cards for her. If there was any reason to resist falling in love with someone (see points 1 and 2), she would have every reason to resist.
OK, so maybe Bastila was weak (I don't think that's fair to her character, though), or maybe your player character is just that damn charming. I admit that I never played this romance, so maybe they wrote it in a way that it worked--BioWare does understand good character development, after all. But I think it's a stretch: a good way to feed the fantasies of the players, but not the best story.

Now let's consider the romance that a female Revan has with pilot Carth Onasi. He doesn't know that you're Revan, or a "made-up" person, until you do (actually, a few minutes before you do, but who's counting?). He's not a Jedi, he's single, and he has a tortured past. Prime romance material, with none of the deterrents Bastila had. You have two thirds of the game to develop your relationship with him--mostly just a strong, trusting friendship, with a little flirting sprinkled in--before the bomb is dropped on it. How my character's relationship with Carth progressed after her true identity was revealed (both with in game dialogue and my own dialogue-in-my-head) was another important part of what made the gaming experience so amazing. Of all your party members, Carth takes learning your identity the hardest; after all, he lost his family--and entire home planet--to the war you started as Revan. But ultimately he learns to forgive you, to see you for who you are now, not who you were--even if you can't. The romance is never "consummated" in the game, not even with a kiss, but when he says "I think I could love you," it's enough.

Even if the Bastila romance isn't as sketchy as I tried to make it seem, it can't have the same depth that the Carth romance has. Once you realize your true identity, Bastila disappears from your party until the end of the game. If you manage to win her back, you only get that one conversation of reconciliation before you have to move on alone towards the final battle. The Carth romance just makes the stronger, truer, more dynamic story. That is why I so passionately wish that Revan had been made female in canon.

My love for the character of Revan makes me want to read the Revan novel. But my love is in no small part specifically for my Revan, a female Light Side Revan, which makes me not want to read the Revan novel. It's not just fans of female Revan, though, who will feel alienated by the Revan of the novel; anyone who played the protagonist with Dark Side choices will find the Light Side hero at odds with the Revan they know and love. The great defining characteristic of games--the beauty of interactivity and player choice--is inevitably lost when the story is translated to another medium (Revan as a choose-your-own-adventure book...that would have been awkward). A male Light Side Revan likely satisfies a plurality of players, possibly even a majority, so it's probably the smart choice for canon and for the novel. But it's not the best choice.

Will I read the book? Maybe eventually. Maybe I'll just read a summary of it, so I can know what happened. Maybe playing SWTOR will give me enough answers. To BioWare's credit, as far as I got in the SWTOR beta, they made it clear that while Revan is generally believed to have been male, Revan's gender is in fact not entirely certain. A bit hard to believe that in a technologically advanced society, 300 years would be enough time to forget a historical figure's gender, but it's explained that the Sith (and maybe Jedi as well) tried to downplay Revan's story and importance. Well, that's BioWare throwing us female-Revan KotOR players a bone. A small bone with little meat, but I'll take what I can get.

My weekend as a Sith Sorcerer

This past weekend I was lucky enough to participate in another weekend beta stress test of Star Wars: The Old Republic. It. Was. Amazing. So amazing that by Sunday night, my boyfriend had declared "I hate SWTOR". I made him take it back, but I can understand why he was jealous of the love and attention I had lavished on SWTOR over the three days prior. While I enjoyed my first SWTOR beta test weekend, this one really got me hooked.

There were two main differences that made this weekend better. One was the simple fact that I had more time. The first weekend, I'd only been able to play Saturday and Sunday. This past weekend I had access from Friday morning until Monday evening--and Friday was a holiday. With more time, I was able to get one of my characters much further in the game than on my first weekend. This meant I had more skills, making the gameplay itself much more fun. I also got to see more of my character's storyline, which in typical BioWare fashion was intriguing, exciting, and entertaining. The other difference was that this weekend, I finally played SWTOR as the multiplayer game that it's made to be. My brother also got into the beta weekend, so we teamed up and adventured together. The first beta weekend, I played alone, as I am used to doing with BioWare games. And it's fine that way. But this weekend, I came to appreciate how great it is to enjoy a BioWare game with friends. Really, really great.

This past beta weekend had staggered start times, so while I got in on Friday, my brother didn't get in until Saturday morning. This was perfect, though, because it would give me time to catch my Jedi Consular up to the point in the game where his Smuggler from the previous beta weekend was. By Friday night, I had a Jedi Shadow waiting in the space station, all ready to team up with his Gunslinger (these are Consular and Smuggler advanced classes, respectively).

But the universe had other, more sinister plans for us. A bug with the beta made it so some characters created in previous beta weekends couldn't sign in anymore, and his Gunslinger was one of the casualties. Luckily, the other character he'd started, a Sith Warrior, was pretty close to the point in the game where my Sith Inquisitor was. Because they start on the same home worlds, we were able to team them up together immediately. And so I began my weekend as a Sith Inquisitor.

The Sith Inquisitor is awesome. If you get the game, I highly recommend this class. I said in my previous post that the Inquisitor storyline was addicting because you are repeatedly told how worthless you are and how you're going to fail and die, fueling your anger and making you more determined to succeed. This eventually gives way (not-so-suprising spoiler) to you becoming Lord Zash's apprentice. Lord Zash is intriguing as the most...amiable...Sith Lord I've come across. Evil and conniving, to be sure, but really quite pleasant and charming. She may try to kill me at some point, but for now, I'm just enjoying training under the coolest Sith master. I want to be just like her some day.

The Inquisitor gameplay was also really fun, particularly once I got my Advanced Class (this happens as soon as you leave your starting planet). Sith Inquisitors can choose to become Sith Assassins, using double-bladed lightsabers and stealth, or Sith Sorcerers, who can heal and make a whole lot of lightning. I chose to become a Sorcerer, and I don't regret it. As soon as I became a Sorcerer, my Whirlwind ability (which traps an enemy in a whirlwind) was extended from a measly 8-second duration to a whole minute, and my ranged spells were extended from 10 m to 30 m (a huge difference). Not only is a 30-m range much more convenient than 10 m, but it also means a lot more eye-candy lightning lancing across the screen. I didn't make it far enough in the game for my specialization in the Sorcerer's Lightning skill tree to become very significant, so I was also a relatively capable healer for my level, which was nice as well. A double-bladed lightsaber and invisibility would have been cool, too, but I really loved my Sorcerer abilities.

Playing alongside my brother's Sith Warrior, I was actually able to witness his class's storyline as well. You're allowed to accompany group members on their class quests, as long as your characters are not the same class (this avoids story inconsistencies: Wait, I thought I was Lord Zash's apprentice!). When you're in someone else's class quest area, you become a "spectator", meaning that you can't participate in any of the conversations or make any decisions. But you can participate in the battles. There are some situations where you may feel a bit like an intruder (as Lord Zash reveals some secret plan to me, she doesn't blink at the fact that someone is there eavesdropping), but seeing another storyline--and having someone else see your own story--really enhanced the experience, in my opinion.

All of the side quests are open to all classes (within a given alignment--Empire or Republic--of course). Conversations related to these quests become multiplayer conversations if you are in a group: each person selects a response, and invisible dice are rolled to determine whose response is spoken. This can be potentially contentious in situations where you're making decisions--to kill or not to kill a captive, for example--but you just have to put up with luck not always going your way. At least the game knows your intentions, so even if your group ends up killing the captive, if you had wanted to save him, you earn Light Side instead of Dark Side points. It's all worth it, because the conversations are more fun with more voices. It gives you something to think about, hoping that your own response is the one chosen, or nodding in appreciation when a companion says something witty or cool.

The truth is, my brother and I made terrible Sith. I would sometimes choose cruel, evil-sounding dialogue, but when it came down to it, we were both softies and almost always made Light Side choices when such situations arose. That's a nice thing about SWTOR. You can be a good person working for the Empire, or a bad person working for the Republic--whatever you want (though you're never allowed to switch sides entirely). And the plot is structured so it still works: At least as far as I got in the game, no plot line was ever derailed because I was too nice or merciful--just shifted, perhaps. This is the great thing about BioWare games in general: having plot choices. Even a person like me, who hates being mean in video games, can find a place in the Empire.

At the very end of the weekend, my brother and I earned our own personal star ships. It was extremely satisfying. Now I can't wait for the game to be released (December 20!!!) so I can get back there, and see what comes next. As much as I love the Inquisitor, though, I still really want to have a Jedi Knight, and Jedi Consular, and Imperial Agent, and Smuggler... There are so many good choices in SWTOR, really anyone can find a place--or multiple places--in the Star Wars galaxy.

My weekend with SWTOR

I had a fantastic weekend playing in a beta test of Star Wars: The Old Republic, but alas, it was all too short. I'm kind of going through withdrawal now. I cannot wait to go back, whether for another beta test or for the official launch of the game next month (less than a month now!).

There are eight different character classes to choose from in SWTOR--four on the Republic side, four on the Empire side--and they each have different personal stories. I ended up starting five different characters, though that spread me thin and I didn't make it very far in each of their stories. Here are some brief thoughts on each one:

Jedi Consular - This one had a sort of typical prologue story, as far as I got, in that I was a promising young Padawan going through trials to become a Jedi. The tests, though, were atypical--rather than something out of a Jedi textbook, the Force was "guiding" my trials; that is, the plot kept thickening and my master would continue to send me out pursuing new leads. The gameplay was fun, but I did end up dying a number of times. This was the first character I played, and I played solo, so I guess dying happens. At least the penalty for death didn't seem so bad.

Jedi Knight - I made this character but didn't play her more than five minutes--enough to be given my first quest, but not enough to complete it. It was mainly interesting to see how her prologue fit alongside the Jedi Consular's. See, each character class shares an origin world with one other character class: Jedi Knights with Consulars on Tython, Smugglers with Troopers on Ord Mantell, Sith Warriors with Inquisitors on Korriban, and Imperial Agents with Bounty Hunters on Nal Hutta. That means that at the beginning of the game, you can only team up with one other class type. From my brief experience with the Jedi Knight, I saw how this works: Side quests generally are shared by both classes, so you can team up for those, but the main quests remain different. The main quests are structured, however, so their locations are similar, making it convenient to accompany someone on their main quest because you can probably complete your own without going much out of their way. At least, that was what I was able to gather with this short experience.

Smuggler - Basically, I was a female Han Solo. I felt pretty cool, and man did I look good in those striped pants. The smuggler also had the most enjoyable recovery skill--while the Consular, for instance, stood there meditating for a few seconds to recover health and energy, the Smuggler would do a variety of things like spin her pistol, throw and shoot a coin, etc.

Sith Inquisitor - I found this one's story to be the most addicting, because the guy giving you orders keeps telling you how worthless you are, how you'll never become a Sith apprentice, you're going to die because you're a weakling, etc. You can feel that good old Sith anger seethe inside you: Just you wait, I'll complete this task, and the next, I'll become an apprentice, and then I'll be a Sith Lord and make you sorry! Very fun.

Imperial Agent - This one has a very cool story from the start, where you're basically going under cover as a pirate, changing accents and manipulating people for the good of the Empire, kind of like some shady CIA agent. You also sound rather like Lady Hawke (Jo Wyatt). I'd known that the Republic Trooper voice was done by Jennifer Hale, but the familiar voice coming out of the Imperial Agent was a pleasant surprise.

One thing that I hadn't realized until I played my multiple characters in the Beta weekend was how closely classes from the two different alignments mirror each other. I knew the classes kind of matched up (Trooper-Bounty Hunter, Smuggler-Agent, Knight-Warrior, Consular-Inquisitor), but I didn't know that most of the skills themselves, even if they have different names, match up as well. Who knew that hurling a series of rocks at an opponent using the Force (Consular) had the same effect as Force Lightning (Inquisitor)? I guess it makes sense from a game perspective, giving you the freedom to choose your side regardless of what kind of play style you enjoy, but it was a bit unexpected.

I don't think I'll say any more, other than that I had a really fun time playing and my quick sampling of five of the different characters has not helped me decide which one I'll start with when the game officially launches. I have received an email saying that I'll be invited to another beta test some time. Next time, I hope to team up with someone, because that's kind of the point of an MMO, right?

I'll leave you with one image I came across in the game:

My character (blue hair), some guy I'm talking to, and a couple bystanders.

Edit 11/22: I just got another testing invite. Not sure of the dates, but possibly for this weekend. I'm so ecstatic that I get another fix! It's already an addiction...

Guess who's a SWTOR tester now?!!!

Yesterday morning, I got the email I'd long been waiting for:

You Have Been Selected to Test Star Wars: The Old Republic!

Eeeeeee!!!!! Following a brief squee, I suddenly became worried that this email had been sent out by accident, after an incident a month ago or so when I panicked upon receiving an email asking for my feedback on testing thus far. Frantic spam box searching occurred before I took to Twitter and discovered that there were a lot of other people having the same issue. The SWTOR team sent out an apology email a day or two later.

But this new email was an invite, not some strange message implying that I should already be testing the game. I quickly followed the link to confirm my place in the testing, and to assure myself that it was a real invite. I'm in. Turns out, the testing I've been invited to is just for this weekend. Yes, we're only a little over a month away from the game being officially released, and yes, it's only for one weekend, but still I'M SO EXCITED!!!!

I downloaded the game, and hopefully everything will run smoothly enough. If all goes well, I will be lost to the real world, in a galaxy far, far away, as of 1:00 PM Hawaii time today. See you all on Monday.

Update: Pottermore, Hellgate, camera, SWTOR

Sorry I've been quiet for the last couple weeks. I've been busy at work, and I have several other diversions that have been occupying my free moments, instead of this blog.

As you may have guessed by the extensive Pottermore potions guide I posted two weeks ago, I've been spending a fair amount of time on Pottermore, honing my potion brewing skills, mainly. Dueling still seems to be down, so potions are the only way to earn House Points at the moment. I now have about 140 potions. While they take a long time to brew (the shortest one has to stew for 80 minutes), they don't require very long periods of active attention (maybe 3-4 minutes each). Still, if you add it all up, I've spent a fair amount of time brewing potions...and even more time in the Ravenclaw common room message boards, giving potion advice, general encouragement, and answering (and asking) some riddles. They could use some changes to the site (especially a REPLY option to comments, so we could find responses to our questions), but I still think it's a lot of fun.

My four-year-old laptop PC broke down in August, but two weeks ago I finally managed to install Windows on the MacBook Pro I use for work. My games are all on an external hard drive, so I can't play them from my office (definitely a good thing). I have to take the laptop home, boot it up in Windows, and plug in the external. It's been working pretty well so far.

At the moment, I'm using it to play an old-ish game: Hellgate. Two and a half years after I mourned the loss of Hellgate: London, it has come back from the dead, having lost the "London" from the title (but not its setting). It is largely the same in its undead form, slightly Asian-ified, less silly, a few poor translations here and there, but most significantly it has new locations...which I haven't reached yet (still too low level). I could go on about Hellgate, but this subject deserves its own post.

In other news, I finally got my new camera! My old camera, a Panasonic Lumix TS2, which at just over one year wasn't actually old at all, broke while I was scuba diving on the Big Island. Yes, I broke a lot of expensive things this summer (spent $700 repairing my car, too). The great tragedy in the camera breaking was that I didn't get any photos from my otherwise perfect and amazing birthday (dolphins and manta rays came to my party!). On the bright side, though, I'd bought the extended 2-year accidental damage warranty (phew!), and it was totally covered. I mailed it in to the Panasonic Customer Care people, they (eventually) called to tell me they couldn't get a replacement (the camera has been discontinued, I guess), so they'd be sending me a check for the full amount I'd paid for the camera last year! I was shocked. I'd been prepared to argue with them to convince them it was covered in the first place, and at best I'd have expected to be refunded the current market value of the camera. This was pretty ideal. I turned around and used that check to buy this year's model, the Panasonic Lumix TS3, which I found for less than the price of the TS2 last year. In addition to having higher quality video and a greater underwater depth limit (40 feet) than the TS2, it also has a GPS. In case, you know, you go hiking in the jungle and want to know the exact spot that you found a certain banyan tree. Or whatever. Hopefully I'll have some nice new pics with the new camera soon.

Last but not least, I was thrilled at the big announcement of the past week: The release date for Star Wars: The Old Republic is set for December 20, 2011. I'm so excited! I've already pre-ordered my copy, and I'm still hoping I'll somehow get in early for testing. On the Imperial side, I'm most interested in the Sith Inquisitor and the Imperial Agent. On the Republic Side, I'm most interested in the Smuggler and the Jedi Knight. And the Jedi Consular. And the Trooper (mainly because of Jennifer Hale). Oh dear, but they all sound so good! I think it'll come down to me starting the characters and seeing which ones draw me in to their stories and make me fall in love with their NPCs. Knowing BioWare, though, that's likely to be all of them. Yes, I'm in trouble. But it's a good kind of trouble I can't wait to get into.

E3 2011: BioWare, and the others

E3, the video game industry's big annual expo, was held this week in L.A. Upcoming games were presented, new hardware was introduced, and there were tons of press conferences, interviews, Q&A's, and demos.

Some of the biggest reveals at this year's E3 are things I don't really care about. I'm always behind the times in terms of smart phones and tablets, so whatever Apple was talking about on Monday won't directly affect me in the near future. I haven't played consoles since the original PlayStation, and I don't have the need for a portable console at this point, so it's highly unlikely I'll get a Wii U or PlayStation Vita. I was mostly interested in the games. And of the games, I was mostly interested in BioWare. That's just my taste.


Star Wars: The Old Republic
I've been excited about this game since the summer of 2008, when EA announced that they were working with BioWare and LucasArts on an MMORPG sequel to the two Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games. I adored KotOR and KotORII, which take place approximately 4,000 years before the rise of Darth Vader, and I was a bit disappointed that they weren't making a straight single-player sequel to finish out the series. But the more I learn about the MMO--personal ships! different companions for each class! fully voiced PC's and multiplayer conversations!--the more excited I get about it. This year at E3, they showed a kick-ass new trailer that has me squeeing.


See on the SWTOR website here.

The SWTOR team showed off Tattooine in their demo at E3, allowing people to explore the iconic planet. This video gives an idea of the gameplay, player companions, types of choices made on quests, and multiplayer conversations.

See on the SWTOR website here.
I find the speeder bike a little goofy, only because the companion disappears as it appears, making it almost seem as if the companion transforms into the bike. Oh well. More videos and info can be found on the SWTOR website, which is updated quite frequently with new reveals. The game is expected later this year, but no date has been announced.


Mass Effect 3
This is the climactic final installment of the epic Mass Effect trilogy, and it's promising to be the best of the three. Throughout Shepard's quest, the Council has dismissed her warnings about the looming Reaper attack, in which an unbelievably ancient and powerful race of machines will attempt to destroy all sentient organic life in the galaxy. Now, as the Reapers launch their attack, it falls to Shepard to rally the galaxy and lead the races to war.

For their E3 press conference, EA debuted a live action trailer for Mass Effect 3. The coolest part about it? Holly Conrad and Crabcat Industries (whom I've mentioned before on this blog), made costumes and the husks for the video! They did an awesome job.


Rumors had been flying for the past week or two that Mass Effect 3 would be Kinect compatible (for the Xbox 360 version only, of course), but this was finally explained at E3. There will not be any motion control, but the game will make use of the Kinect's voice recognition capabilities. Players will be able to select dialogue choices from the dialogue wheel with their voices as well as deliver voice commands to their companions in combat. Check out this demonstration:

Tags: GameTrailers.com, E3 2011: Microsoft Press Con Kinect Walkthrough (Stream), PC Games, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

Personally, I think that the use of voice commands in the dialogue is a bit redundant. First you say one thing out loud, then Shepard in the game says a different line with similar meaning. I'd rather just hear each idea expressed once. But the voice commands in combat are pretty sweet. That's how the commands would be delivered in the battlefield (not with clicks), and the thought that your companions are responding directly to your voice increases the immersion. Chances are I won't ever get to play the Kinect version, but it's fun to see anyway.

Mass Effect 3 is scheduled for release on March 6, 2012. Find more details about Mass Effect 3 and SWTOR at E3, with interviews, demos, and Q&A's, on BioWare TV:
http://www.masseffect.com/me3/game/biowaretv/


Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
I played Morrowind, but skipped Oblivion. The games are beautiful, with vast continuous worlds to explore, and Skyrim looks to be more beautiful and more vast than the previous games in the series. I'm undecided whether I'll get this game or not. It's all well and good to be able to explore, but it's also nice to feel like I have a purpose. In Morrowind, I found myself doing quests for umpteen guilds because they were there, and not because I cared about them or what they stood for. That gets boring after a while. There are many merits to the Elder Scrolls style of games, I just have a preference for BioWare-style dialogue, stories, and NPCs. Still, I have little doubt Skyrim will be a great game. It has big frakking DRAGONS! See a gameplay demo here:
http://www.g4tv.com/videos/53441/The-Elder-Scrolls-V-Skyrim-E3-Gameplay-Demo/
Skyrim will be released on 11-11-11.


Tomb Raider reboot
I never played any of the original Tomb Raider games, and I know very little about this newly announced reboot, other than that it's an origin story. But I'm intrigued because the trailer looks so cool.



Kinect Star Wars
Check out this trailer:


I love the idea of a Star Wars Kinect game. I want to be a Jedi, wielding my lightsaber and tossing enemies around with the Force. But while the Kinect has much to offer in terms of delivering an immersive Star Wars experience, it also has limitations. The problem is traveling. You the player can only move across the space of a few square feet in front of your TV, so how do you get your character to travel more than that? The solution in Kinect Star Wars is that the game moves your character "on rails"--as if you're on a big moving sidewalk that controls where you go--and you just control the character's combat as the game scoots you around. The game may still be fun, but this lack of control could be annoying, and may negatively affect the immersion of the game.

I don't know a good solution to this travel problem. Bend forward slightly to make the character walk forward? That's just asking for back pain. Use a small Nunchuk-like joystick in the left hand to control your walking while the rest of the body is left available to control the character's motion? The point of the Kinect is that you don't need a controller--your body is the controller. Voice commands? Tedious, unwieldy. DDR-style directional pad on the ground to direct travel? That probably would be complicated and tiring. For every idea I come up with, I can think of a reason it won't work. I guess it's up to the developers to solve this conundrum. Once they do, they can finally start making for the Kinect the types of exploration games I love to play.

So I don't leave you on a downer, how about a short little clip of Felicia Day playing Kinect Star Wars?
http://www.viddy.co/feliciaday/video/playing-star-wars-kinect


I didn't follow E3 that closely, since I was working all week, so I know I missed a lot. Let me know of any other awesome games I need to check out!

May the Fourth be with you!

Happy Star Wars Day! Sorry I've been missing from this blog for a few weeks now. Today marks the last day of classes for this semester...and hopefully forever, for me. By the end of this semester (finals are next week), I will have fulfilled all my class requirements for a degree, but there is still a chance that I'll be convinced to take another class in the future, if it will help my research. But for now it's at least my semi-official Last Day of Class.

Back to Star Wars. Warning: this is a rambling post.

Since my embarrassing lack of Star Wars-themed clothing on last December's Wear Star Wars/Share Star Wars in Support of Katie Day, I have acquired two Star Wars-related t-shirts. One is the I Can Haz Force tee from TeeFury. I've worn it twice so far and have received quite a few compliments. The other is the Daddy's Little Girl t-shirt I just got from Her Universe. It's adorable, and it's on sale! Today is a perfect occasion for me to debut the shirt. See the photo of me proudly modeling it!

There was recently a little bit of a fuss about this article tangentially related to Star Wars. It's basically a complaint about how 1) hot actresses so often feel the need to prove their geekiness on talk shows to pander to the nerds, and 2) this proof so often comes in the form of loving Star Wars, even though the movies are very popular and already "culturally validated." As for the first point, it's not only hot actresses who sometimes wind up showing off their geek bona fides on talk shows. Stephen Colbert discussed Balrogs and spouted a bit of Quenya on Conan O'Brien a few years ago. Was he pandering to the nerds? Or was he just a genuine nerd talking about something he loves to talk about? I think that's how most people saw it. But if so, why are the actresses who do the same thing not perceived the same way? I think there's still a bit of reluctance to believe that a woman as "cool" as a hot actress could like something geeky. Thus, whenever one is seen gushing about geeky interests, she must be pandering to the nerd crowd. It may be that an actress promoting a geeky franchise might fake geekiness to pander to the geeks, but an actor in the same situation does the same thing. Don't take it out on the hot actresses. The world needs to accept the fact that women, even pretty ones, can like geeky things just as genuinely as anyone else.

Regarding the second point, it's true that having seen Star Wars and liked it does not make a person geeky. But love for Star Wars can still make you a qualified geek (if we're at the point people need to qualify to be in the geek club). Have you read the novels? Held Star Wars marathons? Do you own a lightsaber? Can you name the aliens in the Mos Eisley Cantina? Can you spell Kashyyyk? Even if someone has merely seen all the movies a half dozen times and quotes Yoda seriously, I'm willing to accept them as a Star Wars geek. Do these actresses have to prove to the writer of that article why they're a geek for loving Star Wars, rather than merely someone who saw the movies and thought they were fun? The writer was just criticizing the fact that they were sharing their geeky interests in the first place. Give them a break.

In any case, this geek welcomes actresses and actors to talk about their geeky interests on talk shows. After all, I find it far more interesting than when they talk about how well their favorite sports teams are doing this year. Silly pandering to the sports fans in the audience ;)

Sorry, now for less rant-y Star Wars news:

I'm continually becoming more and more excited about BioWare's upcoming MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). I'd grown up in a Star Wars-loving family--we had Star Wars-themed birthday parties and played Star Wars monopoly and things like that--but it was really when I played BioWare's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR) that I became a true Star Wars fan. I guess I just wanted to be a Jedi.

I've been following developments in the game on the SWTOR website, but this recent video is the first one I've seen that gave a really good idea of what the gameplay will be like. And I am psyched.


Video on the website here.

Let me just wrap up this rambling Star Wars post with a little anecdote from my morning. The Housemate and I were walking to school, and it being Hawaii, it suddenly started to rain. We pulled out our umbrellas and noted how deploying them was a bit like activating a lightsaber. We swung them around a bit (in extended but still-tied form) imitating the lightsaber sound effect. Then I started to try to deflect the raindrops with my umbrella-lightsaber.

"Do you think Jedi can vaporize raindrops with their lightsabers?"

My boyfriend assured me that they probably could. I'm so glad I have a boyfriend who supports my love of Star Wars, like that other time when I was holding out my hand, trying to summon my water bottle with the Force and he hid from view and tossed it to me. *Sigh*. My wish for this Star Wars Day: May everyone find a friend who helps them pretend they can use the Force.

And May the Fourth be with you!

What's up for 2011: Games

The new year brings anticipation and excitement for new releases. So what games am I looking forward to this year?

Dragon Age II, March 8
I really enjoyed playing Dragon Age: Origins. It introduced a new, exciting, dark fantasy world, populated it with some interesting and entertaining characters, and gave a satisfying quest to complete. The sequel Dragon Age II will be set in a different region of the same world. The player character is named Hawke and can be either female or male, very much like Shepard in the Mass Effect series. My impression with Dragon Age II is that it will be like DAO but made to be more like Mass Effect 2. I thought Mass Effect 2 was one of the best games ever, but I liked DAO as well, so I just hope they don't destroy too many of the elements that made DAO special. In any case, I have this one on pre-order. I haven't had a new game since the summer, so I'm very excited.

Portal 2, April 18
I came late to Portal, only playing it last year after Steam offered it for free. Was that the best buy ever or what? It was unique, challenging, addicting, funny, and very entertaining...but also very short, the sort of thing you complete in one afternoon (the challenges can keep you occupied for longer, if you like, but it's not as much fun as the normal game). Portal 2 will be a full-length game, with new challenges, new elements, and a two-player cooperative mode which will add a new dimension of fun. I can't wait.

Star Wars: The Old Republic, June 16
I'm expecting this to be the game that finally gets me hooked on an MMO. I might quit my job to devote more time to it. Just kidding. Mostly. I played the first two Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games, and I loved them. I was hoping for a KotOR 3 to finish out the series, but instead BioWare took it in a different direction with this MMO. While initially disappointed (and still a little bitter), I've been following this game closely, and it looks so amazing that I think I can forgive them. The scope of this game is huge, with eight character classes with their own stories, companions, and quests. The dialogue is fully voiced, including the player characters. The game will retain the same awesome characteristics that are signatures of BioWare (e.g. engrossing story, tough choices that matter, interesting and lovable companions), all while being an MMO, with what is sure to be an exciting community. It's going to be awesome.

Games that may or may not come out in Q4 2011
Game developers can get optimistic about when they'll be able to release their games. Frequently, the games get pushed back a number of times. While it's frustrating for us fans, it's better than having them release a messy buggy game. Some of these will likely be released this year, but probably not all of them.

Mass Effect 3
Mass Effect 2 was a superb game, but as soon as it finished I was anxious for a sequel to close the trilogy. While I'll be sad to see the saga end when Mass Effect 3 comes out, I'm also extremely excited to play it and see where it leads. It will be particularly interesting to see how the story picks up after Mass Effect 2, given the huge numbers of variables that were decided by the player in the first two games. It will take some careful planning and clever execution, but I have no doubt the Mass Effect team will be able to pull it off beautifully.

Neverwinter
While I'll definitely have Mass Effect 3 on pre-order, this one I may wait to hear the reception of before I purchase a copy. It's an online multiplayer RPG centered around the city of Neverwinter, of the D&D Forgotten Realms. I enjoyed Neverwinter Nights (by BioWare) and Neverwinter Nights 2 (by Obsidian), so hopefully Cryptic Studios will do a good job with this one.

Guild Wars 2
My brother convinced me to play Guild Wars with him as a placeholder between the shutdown of Hellgate: London's online multiplayer capabilities and...whatever new thing came along that he wanted to play with me (turned out that new thing would be Borderlands). He then abandoned me three missions before the end of the main campaign, which I'm pretty bitter about (I finished all by myself). I love the look of the sequel, at least, and hopefully the game will be better in many ways (not that the first one was bad, but there's always room for improvement). This one I'll also probably wait before buying.

Diablo III
Yeah, they haven't even bothered trying to announce a release date for this one. But a girl can dream, right? Diablo II was awesome, and they've taken their sweet time developing this sequel, so I can only assume that it will be even more awesome. I like what I've seen so far.

Dragon Age 2 announced!

Dragon Age 2 was just announced this past week. The website is here:

http://dragonage.bioware.com/da2/

Eeeee! OK, I can't get really excited when there's not even a trailer to see (apparently one will be coming the 17th of August). Actually, it's a little sad that they can make it available for pre-order when all we've seen is the cover of the case plus two images of concept art. But still, I loved the first game, so I am excited to think that next year we might have a sequel. I just loved playing a mage in Dragon Age: Origins, and I look forward to doing it again in DA2.

I wonder what changes they'll make. What we seem to know so far is that DA2 will be slightly more...Mass Effect-like...than DAO. The player character will have a name (Hawke) who will be fully voiced. It's nice to have a voiced character, but it's also nice to be able to choose a line of dialogue rather than a one- or two-word description of a dialogue choice from the dialogue wheel (as in Mass Effect). Hawke, it seems, will have only one generic origin--a big change from the choice of six different extensive origin stories playable in DAO. I hope they don't change it to be too much like Mass Effect. I loved Mass Effect, obviously, but I don't want all my games to be the same. I liked the tons and tons of skills to choose from in Dragon Age. I liked the many, many conversations one could have with one's companions, and the variety of conversations the party members would have with each other. Well, I guess we'll have to wait and see just what things they'll be changing from Dragon Age: Origins. I'm hoping for the best.

I'm still more excited about Star Wars: The Old Republic, but really, it would be nice to take breaks from the MMO with a single-player game like DA2. And one can never have too much BioWare.

Can't wait for Star Wars: The Old Republic

So two weeks ago I gushed about how much I want a Kinect, and how cool Felicia Day was trying it out at E3. But really, the thing at E3 that I am truly most excited about is BioWare's upcoming massively multiplayer online game (MMO), Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR).

As a fan of BioWare's own Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR) and Obsidian's KotOR 2, I was disappointed when it was announced that instead of a straight follow-up sequel, BioWare was doing an MMO sequel set three hundred years after the previous games. I'm still a little sad that they didn't tie up the plots set in motion in KotOR 1 and 2 with a KotOR 3 game featuring all of our favorite characters from the previous games. But based on what I've heard so far about The Old Republic, I think I can smother that disappointment with the awesomeness that will be BioWare's first MMO.

For those unfamiliar with these things, BioWare (creator of Baldur's Gate I and II, Neverwinter Nights, KotOR, and Mass Effect 1 and 2) is known for games with complex stories, strong writing, and plenty of player choices affecting the outcome of the story; a variety of interesting non-player characters (NPCs); and branching conversations, where player dialogue choices can steer conversations in different directions. That's why I love BioWare games so much. When I play a game, I want to feel immersed in an exciting story and world where I feel like I'm doing interesting and relevant things. However, these are traits that MMOs are not necessarily known for. After all, how could you possibly make a game for millions of players that includes all of those things? I can't speak for all of them, but I generally think of MMOs as games with straightforward stories that the individual players can't influence; a focus on other players which takes away the need for interesting NPCs; and largely one-sided conversations where NPCs just tell you to do things for them.

SWTOR is an MMO, but BioWare isn't skimping on any of the...BioWare-ness. That makes it one of the most ambitious video games ever made. Each of the eight classes that players can choose from has its own complex, engaging storyline where the player will get to make a variety of tough choices. Each class will have its own selection of NPCs to recruit. And, somehow, the game will allow branching conversation choices, even when multiple player characters (PCs) are present in the conversation. Furthermore, all dialogue will be fully voiced. Every possible line spoken by every NPC and every PC will be read by a voice actor in a recording studio so that the audio world of the game is complete. That is a LOT of dialogue (BioWare's Director of Audio described it as 10 KotORs back to back).

About the character classes. Players will get to choose between two allegiances: the Sith Empire, or the Galactic Republic. Those siding with the Republic choose from the Trooper, Smuggler, Jedi Knight, and Jedi Consular classes. Those siding with the Sith choose from the Bounty Hunter, Imperial Agent, Sith Warrior, and Sith Inquisitor classes. Now, I almost always like to play "good" characters in games (in this case, that would generally mean the Republic). When I first learned what all the classes were, I decided that I would probably want to play as a Jedi Consular or a Jedi Knight. I mean, who wouldn't want to be a Force user? After watching a few more videos and thinking about it a little more, I decided that a Smuggler might be fun too (Han Solo is the man, after all). And out of curiosity I might consider trying a Sith Warrior or Inquisitor in order to see some of the Dark Side story, since BioWare has said that we will see no story overlap between the two allegiances. But I dismissed the idea of playing as a Trooper or Bounty Hunter, and the Imperial Agent sounded totally lame. UNTIL I read the developer blogs. Each of the eight classes has a post written by one of the writers working on its story, giving readers an idea of what the class's story is like, how it feels to play that class, and what choices the player will have to make as that class. And somehow, these blogs made each class sound awesome! Even the Imperial Agent sounds cool, sort of like a galactic CIA operative, holding her own amongst people with greater firepower because she holds the invaluable secrets, working behind the scenes not for glory but because everything would fall apart without her. Now I want to play them all! I really don't know where to start.

Another awesome thing in SWTOR that we learned at E3: Each player gets his or her own spaceship. I am so excited about it. A place that you can relax in between missions, talk to your NPC teammates, and customize as you see fit (I hope there's a good amount of customization!). And, even better, you can invite other players to visit, so you can show off your digs. (That was one of my sadnesses with Morrowind: I had the coolest stronghold that I spent a considerable amount of time decorating very thoughtfully, but no one ever got to see it).

There are so many cool things we already know about SWTOR, and probably many more that haven't been announced yet. I can hardly wait for its release. I'm all signed up for testing...along with everyone in the world. But, please, please pick me! I'm in Hawaii, so there can't be many people in my time zone! I'm a girl, plus I'm very meticulous, so I can help a lot! Really! Please? Oh well, chances are I'll have to wait until next spring to play it with everyone else. But I have faith that it'll be worth the wait (and the price). So, come spring 2011, you'll find me in a galaxy far, far away playing a Jedi Knight. No--Imperial Agent. No--Sith Warrior. No--Smuggler. Gaaah!

Here's the awesome trailer from E3:


See it on the SWTOR website here:
http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/hope-cinematic-trailer
(I would have embedded that one, but it played automatically, which is annoying.)