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Heimskringla

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  1. I'm considering unsubscribing unless 12x XP comes back. I've done the Imperial planet quests so many times that I don't want to finish leveling by BH now. I'd be willing to pay at least 1200cc per character to enable 12x xp. I love the story quests, but the side content is not something I enjoy repeating. I really enjoyed the BH story far more than I imagined I would, but the thought of going through the mind-numbing side quests again with the BH and the Agent is just too much.
  2. The Bane books were quite good, especially for Star Wars fiction. Drew Karpyshyn did a pretty bloody good job of characterizing a Sith. His characterizations of Bane and Zannah are certainly better than what, say, the Inquisitor got in game. Zahn's Thrawn trilogy hasn't been topped, though. I, Jedi was also an enjoyable read. The X-Wing Rogue/Wraith Squadron books were good reads, too, or at least I enjoyed them when I was younger. I read Plageus shortly after it came out, and I rather liked it, although it further fueled my disenchantment with the Inquisitor story.
  3. I don't know that the future is necessarily bright. I think Bioware has managed to salvage the game from being a total flop. Personally, my bar for success is Bioware being able to complete the next installment of the original class stories, which is something I don't think will happen in the near future.
  4. Deceived was the best of the bunch as far as SWTOR tie-in novels. I thought Fatal Alliance was just okay. Red Harvest was good, if you enjoy zombie horror. Revan was also just okay. I felt like Karpyshyn was tired of Revan by the time he wrote the book; it wasn't as good as his other Star Wars novels. That said, all of the novels are about on the level of Jim Butcher or George R.R. Martin. They're entertaining reads but none of the authors are Nabokov or Paul Auster, so don't expect amazing works of literature. They're good to middling Star Wars stories related to The Old Republic.
  5. APAC players are usually inconvenienced when games don't have servers specifically for APAC players. If I remember correctly, TOR had APAC servers but shuttered them due to chronically low population after the game flopped. That said, for a majority of the playerbase the downtimes have become more tolerable.
  6. I wonder if they gave the SI and JC stories to the same writer or if the writers sat next to each other. The stories do seem a bit similar in terms of the rather uninspiring nature. The "Force Mystic" stories, overall, seem to be the weakest in the game. They're probably some of the more challenging stories to write, and those stories were (inexplicably) given to inexperienced, or at least largely unpublished, writers instead of to the big name writers with serious credibility/ability. My biggest gripe with the Inquisitor perhaps comes from my own ideas of what Palpatine's training would have been like to create the character we see in the prequels and later in the OT. I don't get that feel at all from the SI's story. The SI is the underdog/dumb kid who. despite not knowing his arse from a hole in the ground, is thrust into power with Zash behind him as a puppeteer of sorts. I loved the class mechanics, but I just couldn't deal with the story by the time I got to Voss. Now that I've read Luceno's treatment of Darth Plageius I like Bioware's take on "the Palpatine story" even less.
  7. I think you misread my reply. Every romance companion has 2-3 e-mails that you get almost immediately after completing the romance; this can happen somewhere in the high 9000's on the affection meter. However, after those mails there is nothing more from your romance-able companion. I know the previous poster wanted to be able to save the mails we already get, and I agree it would be nice to be able to save mail from particular npcs.
  8. It doesn't seem like it would be terribly difficult for Bioware to add in e-mails/letters now and again, especially if they only added them in for romanceable companions.
  9. Bioware didn't design the companion system to allow players the freedom to make Big Choices for the sake of story. Early iterations of the companion system allowed for equipping of companion abilities via kits, so you could equip an AOE kit, a single target DPS kit, or a healer kit on any companion. With that system, the option to be able to kill companions made sense. You could kill a companion and not have your PvE adversely affected. Bioware apparently had a testing group that thought the companion kits were lulzy, and so Bioware decided to change companion abilities to their current form. The result was that story decisions allowing you to kill your companion meant that you would find yourself at a disadvantage in PvE gameplay if you chose to kill a companion. So, players made story choices without realizing that those choices would have a deleterious effect on their gameplay experience. It was probably cheaper/easier for Biowar to remove the dialogue trees that led to <Kill Him/Her/It> than it was to re-design the companion system to allow players to choose which abilities to give their companions. The situation had very little to do with players whining and more to do with some questionable design decision by Bioware. It more or less is another datum indicating that Bioware is very much a single-player RPG company and is completely clueless about how to design for an MMO.
  10. They've pretty much said it's not feasible to do companion story updates given that most players only use one companion. I don't think we'll see updates to companion stories any time in the next year. If we're lucky, we''ll see some expansion of the story by 2014, but I'd guess that 2013 will be WZs, FPs, and raids. As far as the OP: Once you get to the romance option, that's usually about it. Some companions have a quest or two past that, but after that... it just stops. You get one or two e-mails the same day you reach 10k affection and finish the quests, and then there's nothing.
  11. SI: ]Khem Val - He offers to eat your enemies. How could I not finish his story? Granted, I got bored with my SI at 45, so I haven't technically finished Khem's story, even though he is at max affection. Ashara - The part where you start corrupting her on Taris was the only remotely Palpatine-like moment in the story, aside from the Nar Shadda arc. Plus, she's the only romanceable option for male SI's. I didn't use Talos Drellik very much, but he was a cool character as far as I got with him. SW: Vette - I like the way her voice-actor sounds, and her dialogue is usually witty enough to enjoy. Her story is pretty interesting, too. She's a very useful character for tank specced Juggernauts, too. Quinn - I loathe Quinn. He comes off as a prissy ponce with a stupid mole on his cheek. I sometimes use Quinn for the heals, but I usually send him off on missions. Pierce - I really like the character's story, but I have absolutely no need for a tank companion. Jaesa - Lightside Jaesa is pretty meh. "Can I speak as a Jedi?" "No. No, you may not." "Well, anyway... when we turn all the sith into the Jeedais..." "How the hell are you still a Lighty anyway? I killed your first master, and your parents, and then I turned Nomen Karr into a raving Dark Side loving lunatic. Further, how the hell do you still think I am an agent of the light? I killed your parents for sport. I just started a Smuggler, so the only companion I have there is Corso, who seems pretty cool. Sort of like a space redneck or something. The SW has the most memorable companions, so far. The SI's companions are all kind of meh.
  12. If I had to guess, I would guess that there's not a big rush for Chapter 4. We may see individualized chapters for each class, but I doubt it. I hope I'm wrong, because I really want to see what can possibly happen next for my Warrior. I also would like to see a competent writer redeem my bumbling oaf of an Inquisitor. I would guess that Q2 2013 or 2014 are the earliest we will see class story updates.
  13. I would like to see better incentives to hunt champion mobs. There's nothing more anticlimactic than killing them and having the same drops as trash mobs, over and over, and over.
  14. Lots of jaggy shoulder projections and things. I hope you can pull the mods out of it and still keep the set bonuses.
  15. Hickman needs to deal with reality. The sub fee wasn't what kept me away from TOR for ~9 months. It wasn't even other games. It wasn't really even the lack of end game content, although that was a big part of why I clicked the unsub button. What kept me away from TOR was a lack of clearly articulated vision for the game and the inability of senior people at Bioware to acknowledge that there were serious flaws with the game. The game wasn't worth $14.99 a month at launch, and it still isn't. Development moves at a pace that can most charitably be described as glacial, there's still no real sense that anyone at Bioware has any idea where the game needs to go to succeed, and developer response to community concerns is anemic at the best of times. "State of the Game" posts have been par for the course for many MMOs for years. LOTRO, DDO, STO, TSW, and SWG all have (or had in SWG's case) them. Show us where end game is going. Pay attention to the subcommunities that participate in the end game content. Commit to communicating better and actually doing something about the myriad of issues plaguing the game. Acknowledge that PvP has essentially become Stun v. Stun. Commit to creating raids that implement novel mechanics and actually challenge players. Be open about your plans for story content. I don't play this game for its novel approach to mechanics, but I do play it for the individualized class stories. I can get broad, well VO'd, well animated stories from TSW, in addition to some novel tweaks to standard MMO mechanics. The only thing I can't get is the individualized story. If you're no longer able to do class stories, be honest. If you can't afford to update companion stories, be honest. If what we'll have to look forward to is shared planetary arcs, be honest.
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