DISCLAIMER: I recently went on anti-depressive med­ic­a­tion again, and that plays havoc with my abil­ity to con­cen­trate for the first weeks. So this art­icle is just me ram­bling more or less coher­ently. Please feel free to ask if I make no sense whatsoever.

I just fin­ished listen­ing to the latest TOR­Wars pod­cast and I came away more than a little dis­ap­poin­ted. There were two pieces of inform­a­tion that really put a dampener on my enthu­si­asm for the Makeb expan­sion: no more class story, and how SGRAs were implemented.

I really want to rage and flip tables about the first one, but my cur­rent men­tal health state just allows me to be *meh* about it. Story, espe­cially the inidividual class stor­ies were the reason I sub­scribed to the game. Stor­ies were the thing this game offered me, that other games didn’t. Now Bioware wants to cas­trate this fea­ture that set their game apart from all the other MMOs out there? Why? To me, this makes abso­lutely no sense.
This isn’t even an eco­nom­ic­ally sound decision. It might please the short term bean-counters, but on the long run, giv­ing up on indi­vidual story con­tent erodes the game’s dis­tinct­ive­ness. Why should I play SWTOR when I can have the same old dungeon/raid/pvp dance (for which I couldn’t care less, to be hon­est) in so many other games? Indi­vidual class stor­ies made for great replay­ab­il­ity. If you take that away the game loses much of its appeal to me and I lose a kick­ass argu­ment for recruit­ing other people into the game.
I’ll reserve my final judge­ment over this until I have played through Makeb with all my char­ac­ters — but what I took away from the pod­cast was that the storylines didn’t offer much dif­fer­en­ti­ation for classes. You get two dis­tinct­ive stor­ies — one for each side — and that’s it. From what I heard, the stor­ies are both very well done, though.

The other thing are SGRs. Looks like there will be two “big” SGR choices on Makeb a female/female one for the Repub­lic side, and a male/male one for Empire. Dig­ging around on the for­ums made me stumble over some mum­blings that there are other one-off flirts, too.
I am torn about this. On the one hand: FUCK YEAH FINALLY! On the other hand: REALLY?! That’s the best you could come up with? Both reac­tions are cur­rently duk­ing it out in my head. I think the more optim­istic one is cur­rently win­ning because I still hope that this is only just the begin­ning and that we will see more SGRA con­tent added to the game which will bal­ance out everything nicely. I def­in­itely do not agree with people say­ing “That’s as good as it gets!” and I will vehe­mently fight for improve­ment in this area of the game. And I am not alone.

Am I look­ing for­ward to RotHC? Yes, I do. The little bits and pieces that I allowed myself to see — I am hor­ribly afraid of spoil­ers, you see — made me eager to get my hands on the new con­tent. This eager­ness was slapped down pretty hard by today’s news, though. Still look­ing for­ward, but much less enthu­si­astic. HELP, I think I turn into a jaded old MMO coot.

So, read­ers, can I have some of your opin­ions here?

P.S: And now I am off to level my only male Imp, Hadúr the Imper­ial Agent. On The Pro­gen­itor. Feel free to say hello!

No, Agent. I don’t mind being a stay at home father.

See, that’s what hap­pens to your char­ac­ters when you neg­lect them for an exten­ded amount of time. They go and start a fam­ily. Ha, not really but it would be kind of awe­some, yes? Even though try­ing to fig­ure out how that, you know, happened might be a bit on the dis­turb­ing side.

Now they only have to come up with a name for the little darling. Any suggestions?

Dear Luci­fer,

I am so very sorry for the icicles on your te.… youknowwhatImean.

Okay,  not really. But but see­ing you under that moun­tain of blankets, clasp­ing a mug of lava-hot chocol­ate in your shiv­er­ing claws… I thought you might want to hear some kind words.

Hope you’ll accli­mate soon, I heard a snowstorm is comming.

Sin­cerely, Cleeyah

Sooooo, with that out of the way, let me just say YAY! Finally! We have word from Jeff Hick­man him­self about Same Gender Romances in his latest State of the Game post:

First of all, I want to apo­lo­gize that this is tak­ing so long to get in the game. I real­ize that we prom­ised SGR to you guys and that many of you believed that this would be with a com­pan­ion char­ac­ter. Unfor­tu­nately, this will take a lot more work than we real­ized at the time and it (like some other pieces of con­tent we talked about earlier in the year) has been delayed as we focused on the changes required to take the game Free-to-Play. As we have said in the past, allow­ing same gender romance is some­thing we are very sup­port­ive of.

Secondly, I want to reveal today that we are adding SGR with some NPCs on Makeb and do intend on pur­su­ing more SGR options in the future. More details to come!

I am very happy and excited that we now have offi­cial proof that this con­tent is com­ming. Nev­er­the­less, the state­ment itself is wide open for spec­u­la­tion. What, for instance does “many of you believed that this would be with a com­pan­ion char­ac­ter” mean exactly? That we will not get romances with com­pan­ion char­ac­ters at all, or just not for the next updates? And will adding the same gender flirts in Makeb be all that is given to us? Won’t that make the game pay2gay?

My per­sonal inter­pret­a­tion of Mr Hickman’s words is that SGRs that go bey­ond simple one-off flirts will be made, but they won’t be in pub­lish­able shape within the fore­see­able future. To appease us they throw us a few bones with same gender flirts in Makeb. Now, this might just be another attempt of string­ing us along for another year. Or it might not. Only time will tell. Right now I am cau­tiously optimistic.

As you see, the answer has pro­duced more ques­tions. Let’s hope we won’t have to wait that long for answers again. Or we’ll have to involve GLAAD again. Because, let’s be hon­est here, I highly doubt we would have got­ten a peep if we hadn’t involved GLAAD and sev­eral other gam­ing out­lets. You see, Bioware, we are still able and will­ing to break out the thumb­screws if neces­sary. *evil grin*

P.S: I cur­rently take bets on the prob­ab­il­ity of a SGR teaser scene being included into any trailer they might pro­duce about the expan­sion. It would make my day, but I some­what doubt it.

So. One year of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Des­pite my last post I have to say that I am still very fond of the game. It is not per­fect, but also not as godaw­ful as a lot of haters want to make people believe.

The good stuff:

• Solo play­ab­il­ity. While this gets cri­ti­cised a lot, it is actu­ally a big plus for shy-to-sociophobic little old me. Some days I don’t feel like being social, and the game does not pun­ish me for it.
• Char­ac­ter stor­ies. I love them, and I hope we will see con­tinu­ations of them in the future. Char­ac­ter stor­ies are the big thing besides role­play­ing that cur­rently keep me in the game.
• It is the first MMO I encountered where lev­el­ing a healer isn’t an exer­cise in mas­ochism. I actu­ally feel pretty power­ful being able to solo heroic quests.
• Com­pan­ions. Not only are they enter­tain­ing, they also teach you how to play your role (to a degree) from pretty early on.
• The role­play. I have found a lot of good role­play ran­ging form can­tina role­play to very elab­or­ate stor­ies involving sev­eral guilds work­ing together.
• The cus­tom­is­able UI, and that you can share your per­sonal UI with other players.
• Duh, it’s Star Wars!

The not-so-good stuff:

• Still no chat­bubbles. I have learned to adapt to their lack, but I still really miss them.
• I still can­not sit in the chairs! *grumbles*
• No paid server trans­fers. My lonely Sith War­rior on The Ebon Hawk would like to join her col­legues on The Pro­gen­it­ors very much, Bioware…

The Really Bad Stuff:

• No Same Gender Romances, des­pite Biowares prom­ise to include them, and Biowares sus­pi­cious lack of com­mu­nic­a­tion with the fans who want them included.
• The offi­cial game forum. Do not go there if you don’t have to. I always thought WoW’s for­ums were bad, but they sadly are noth­ing com­pared to the troll-pit of SWTOR’s forum.
• The memory-leak bug that makes the game crash to desktop after approx­im­ately one hour of play­ing. I hope this one gets fixed soon. I think I have died to this bug more often than to actual mobs.

Con­sid­er­ing all of the above, I think SWTOR is still worth my monthly sub­scrip­tion. I am not really bothered by the games sup­posed lack of endgame con­tent, as I am not likely to take part in that any­way. If you want to know if this aspect of the game is really as bad as some people nois­ily claim, you’ll have to ask someone else who is more know­ledgable about it.
Right now I think I get my money’s worth of enter­tain­ment out of the game. Yes, I do have my Very Big Pet Peeve, but I am not let­ting that one blind me to all the other good stuff.

I hope the next year will be bet­ter for SWTOR than its rocky first one, and that the game will even­tu­all find its feet again. I am not very fond of the Car­tel Shop, but if it helps the game grow, who am I to com­plain? Right now I am cau­tiously optim­istic. That’s good, right?

and we still do not have SGRs, Bioware. What gives?

Same gender romances were prom­ised to the play­erbase before gamelaunch and a lot of people are still wait­ing for their imple­ment­a­tion. Some more, and some less patient. And no, not all of them are les­bi­ans. Or gays. Or Bisexu­als. Or any other Other that still gets mar­gin­al­ized too much. A lot of people wait­ing for same gender romances are straight — like me.

Over the year we got fed a few scraps of inform­a­tion, but over­all our interest was met with an almost deaf­en­ing silence. There is one lonely thread on the Story and Lore forum that has gone through sev­eral rein­carn­a­tions dur­ing the whole year and it took a ridicu­lous amount of work to get even a very sparse answer out of the com­munity man­agers. Which basic­ally boiled down to “We can­nto tell you any­thing.” Any other thread was either deleted or got redir­ec­ted to that lonely ghetto thread. Only recently another thread on the gen­eral forum was allowed to per­sist. Unsur­pris­ingly the the­ory of a gag-order from some higher ups has cropped up. Some days I believe in it , too.

At the same time Bioware enjoys being lauded for their LGBT inclus­ive­ness. And while this is jus­ti­fied for the Mass Effect and Dragon Age games, it unfor­tu­nately isn’t for SWTOR, even though the demand is very, very clearly there. The cog­nit­ive dis­son­ance is quite jar­ring. I can only ima­gine how insult­ing this must feel for LGBT players.

Right about now a simple announce­ment that, yes, this con­tent is still com­ming would appease a lot of the people who are los­ing their patience with Bioware. A new expan­sion has been announced recently. This would have been the per­fect oppor­tun­ity for such a state­ment. But we got noth­ing. Unsur­pris­ingly this did not go down very well, and a let­ter writ­ing cam­paign has been kicked off. GLAAD has been con­tac­ted and they will con­tact Bioware about this. TORWARS had a dis­cus­sion about this in their latest pod­cast, blog art­icles (like this one) have been writ­ten. Other gaming-news sites have shown interest as well. If Bioware doesn’t act now, they have only them­selves to blame if this boils over.

And to make this very, very clear: this is not a few entitled play­ers whin­ing on the forum. This is a siz­able chunk of the play­erbase being at their wit’s end. So we have turned to pok­ing the zom­bie with a stick to get a reac­tion. Any reac­tion. Even if the answer is no, this con­tent has been shelved. At least that would finally be an answer, and we could move on.

At the moment I am very reluct­ant to give Bioware my money. I will keep up my sub­scrip­tion, but won’t make any Car­tel Shop pur­chases, or buy the expan­sion unless we get an answer. One way or the other.

Fur­ther Reading:

SGRA Thread FAQ

SGR Timeline

Both by Natashina

I agree that games are not a plat­form for deal­ing with social issues. For a developer, they are not and really can­not be the primary con­sid­er­a­tion. But they are not some­thing to be dis­carded as irrel­ev­ant. We have influ­ence— on what is con­sidered “nor­mal” and “accept­able” as much as any­thing else. Even when we inten­tion­ally are not say­ing some­thing, we are still say­ing some­thing even by its omis­sion— and that means we have a respons­ib­il­ity to think about what that is.

David Gaider: The Impact of Games, Bioware Edmonton

Com­ments to this post will be mod­er­ated and might not show up imme­di­at­ley. If your post doesn’t show up AT ALL you might have pissed off the blog­mis­tress.

Well, David Amatan­gelo at least THINKS that’s what is going to hap­pen.

Which would make me insanely happy, because then I could finally start lev­el­ling Tarvek, my Imper­ial Agent char­ac­ter that I had cre­ated ages ago with the SGR in mind for him. I am extremely happy that Bioware seems to go through with this and keeps their prom­ise, des­pite the noise sev­eral hategroups and big­ots were making.

I remem­ber read­ing that the SGRs would not hap­pen with the com­pan­ions we already have, so this MIGHT also mean we get new com­pan­ions. SGRs plus new coma­pion plus new planet seems like a really big story-update. *woot*

Any­body else going to roll a new char­ac­ter to exper­i­ence the Same Gender Romances?

I can­not believe that it took me so long to real­ise this. There are no spiders in SWTOR. YAY! Okay, there are bugs, but those.… really don’t bug me. (Sorry, couldn’t res­ist that one…) Con­sidered that spiders hit my big ick-button it is kind of amaz­ing that I only real­ised this now. I guess that’s one of those signs of me get­ting old.

And to give this late-night post a little bit more sub­stance, I’ll re-post an awe­some trailer for the Imper­ial Agent class that Anachan from Light Rank V pos­ted on her own blog. Enjoy!

After mak­ing enough of a racket the European role­play­ers that had pre­vi­ously been told by Bioware to remain on their bleed­ing out RP-PVP serv­ers are now allowed to move to a RP-PVE server:

Lord Calypho -> The Progenitor

Jen’Jidai -> Van­jer­valis Chain

Hunt­mas­ter -> Battle Meditation

Role­play­ers who have already trans­ferred to the offered pure PVP serv­ers can con­tact cus­tomer ser­vice to have their char­ac­ters moved to the RP-PVE servers.

I con­grat­u­late Bioware on tak­ing this step, espe­cially as I can fore­see a wave of whin­ing from people who do not get the unique cir­cum­stances the people with char­ac­ters on Lord Calypho, Jen’Jidai, and Hunt­mas­ter were in.

I am a new res­id­ent on The Pro­gen­itor, too, and I wel­come the refugees from Lord Calypho. Let’s all have awe­some role­play­ing ses­sions together!

Th’ane’a on Voss, shortly after reach­ing level 50.

I dinged my first max-level char­ac­ter yes­ter­day. Yep, Th’ane’a is level 50 now. Don’t ask me HOW I did it, but it actu­ally happened on Voss. Yeah, I was sur­prised, too.

I decided to just play Correllia’s story arc and the rest of my class-quests, and to keep all the remain­ing other quests for the future exten­sion. On the one hand, this will keep me out of the way of the new-content-stampede, once BW adds that new con­tent. On the other hand, I’ll firmly remain slightly ahead of the lev­el­ing curve, which I feel very com­fort­able with. The more I pro­gressed through my class-quests toward the point where the quest level matched my actual level… ack. I never claimed to be an MMO god­dess. For a while I hon­estly feared that I would hit a wall before being able to fin­ish my class story, but I sur­prised myself. Gods, was I proud of myself.

There might be spoil­ers from here on out…
(more…)

Bioware has finally reached a decision for the dilemma that the European RP-PVP server res­id­ents faced. There was only one European server for each lan­guage, and they suffered from low pop­u­la­tions as almost every other server. There was quite a con­tro­versy about which des­tin­a­tion server was to be offered.

Well, Bioware has made its decision — and has left role­play­ers in the dust by offer­ing trans­fers to reg­u­lar PVP serv­ers. Role­play­ers who are not inter­ested in PVP only have the option to remain on their bled out serv­ers. Which is bad, and role­play­ers are right­fully com­plain­ing. No reac­tion from Bioware so far. :\

Really? Why not offer those role­play­ers a new haven, too, Bioware? I am sure The Pro­gen­itor has still enough room for a few more role­play­ers. This is a spe­cial case and deserv­ers a spe­cial solu­tion, so offer­ing up two pos­sible des­tin­a­tion serv­ers would have been only fair.