Star Wars, Those Good Old, Staaaaaaar Wars

Yes, that's the original SNL Bill Murray song I've attached. Aren't you glad? (Click the title of this entry and enjoy!)

So far I have to say I'm really happy that Bioware is behind this. After playing WoW and then Dragon Age and Dragon Age II, I found that I really do love me some lore. WoW really sucked at story line. It was just not well thought through; they often violated their own storylines, and the quests rarely added up to anything. DA and DA2 had choices where I actually stopped and struggled for as long as 10 minutes before committing to a decision, knowing it would impact the game play. It's not quite that obviously instrumental in the MMO version, but I know it's going to matter somehow somewhere down the road. That's how Bioware rolls.

They have shown some real naivete with regard to what are now coonsidered standard elements of MMOs, in particular in their auction house mechanic. Ugh. We'll see; it's just out of the wrapper and I like to think there's a lot of updates, patches, and hot fixes in our future. Let us hope the mechanic and the interface for the auction house aregoing to be near the top of the list. As it's set now it completely undercuts the motivation for crafting professions. Buy or buy not; there is no bid. Prices for listing and consequences for expired auctions and the house cut on sales... all are way too steep. The search is way too constrained in some ways, and fails to allow the searcher to constrain sufficiently in other ways. It's as if these guys never played WoW. Dude, that game's been out and been *hot* for five years. Focus up.

Another annoying element is the insistance on Coruscant as the locale for all training. (Probably there's stuff on other planets but for the foreseeable future I'm stuck on Coruscant.)  So I ding way the hell out in Justicar territory and I have to abandon everything and head back to the main city for training. If I burn my "hearth stone" getting there (cause I'm nowhere near a transport station), I'm going to have to fly back to a fairly close location and then run run run run run back to where I had been questing. Grrr.

So there are little annoyances like that but overall it's worth it. The art is beautiful, if your compie can run it. Mine can, thank god. The music is the real deal from the movies, which helps keep the whole "dude, I'm playing Star Wars!" vibe intact.

I've rolled and am leveling all four classes: Jedi Consular (Sage/healer), Jedi Knight, Smuggler, and Trooper. The odd thing is that whatever I'm playing at the moment is my favorite, which mostly means they have good mechanics and I don't feel like one toon is more OP and thereby more fun than the others. I think my Consular is my favorite because of the force stuff and the light sabre, which I rarely use. Here's a shot of her in Coruscant. Dig the background.