So Farewell Then, Star Wars: The Old Republic

So, over the weekend I cancelled my subscription to Star Wars: The Old Republic. My poor Jedi Knight will now be consigned to live out her days in a freezing cave on Hoth, wondering why no-one had the decency to port her back to the Republic Fleet where at least they have a bar and hot running water. She'll never get through your romance options with Doc and his cheesy dialogue and cheesier facial hair. She'll never get to the end of whatever your personal plot line turns out to be. I almost feel sorry for her. But in the end I just found myself not caring anymore, and not feeling the urge to login and play, and so it is no-more. From reading the gaming press, I am not alone.

So what went wrong? I mean, when we started playing SW:TOR I was really impressed with it, and only a few months later, I'm grabbed by ennui. What gives?

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Tatooine and Alderaan

In between everything else thats going on, me and Z are still ploughing our way through Star Wars: The Old Republic, albeit at a less frantic pace than before. As you approach the mid-to-late levels of any MMO, and SWTOR is no exception, it's always felt like an awkward stage, and where I've fallen out of quite a few over the years. The problem is simple enough, really - the "newness" of the mechanics, gimmicks and general world-building has faded, to be replaced with familiarity, and (expected) great opening up of "the endgame" has yet to emerge. For a story-driven game like SWTOR aspires to be, it at least has something to hang on to, to try and ease you past those bumps. But SWTOR has another trick up it's sleeve too; it can send you to some of the really famous locations available to it from it's license. 

I was waiting for a mission to pick up Power Converters but it never arrived! 

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Taris and Nar Shadda

So, once we got through with cleaning up the murky underpants of the Republic capital, we were offered a choice of worlds to go to next. Well not a choice, really, more that we have to do both but can do them in any order. Even though one is flagged as lower level than the other. So a choice, yes, but one which you're pretty pointed at the "right" answer. That said, it did get me thinking about how there seems to be different ways to approach The Old Republic; each world so far as a mix of solo "open" content, your class-specific content, and then 2- and 4-man mini-dungeons you can run. Through Coruscant we'd done all of it, and approached the next worlds slightly over levelled, something that became more even apparent when we'd finished Taris to the same degree.

But I think really what you're presented with is a real choice - if a world leaves you cold for whatever reason you can nip in, ignore everything but your class-quest arc, and then nip out again, and there is enough "spare" exp lying around from other sources to compensate. Personally I'm finding TOR as a game about "the journey", and the stories are generally pretty good, so my inclination to skip is limited, but i do appreciate that the option is there. Anyway, onto the worlds themselves!

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Coruscant

Slowly but surely, me and the missus are still playing through The Old Republic. This means that we are officially "subscribers" now, having paid for our second month, and I've not seen much about the overall performance of the game now that initial month has passed. Anecdotally, most of the people I know that bought the game are still playing, but what that means in the bigger picture I'm not so sure. I hope it's doing well though, the MMO space could do with a bit more competition surviving in the more premium end, especially as most of the (still anecdotal) stories I'm getting out of World of Warcraft paint a picture of a game sucking up huge large subscriber numbers but now just coasting lazily along.

Anyway, the next world in TOR after the introductory planet has taken us a while to get through, but it's pretty indicative, I think, of the leveling game as a whole.

Coruscant! Coruscant! Coruscant! (it's only a levelling zone)

Star Wars: The Old Republic: The First 10 Levels

One of the things I've said a couple of times over the new year period was that quitting World of Warcraft was a great decision, as it freed up a lot of time that we then spent consuming games and TV that otherwise we would have missed out on. So naturally, signing up for another MMO sounds like an act of madness, right? Well perhaps. But the one thing that kept up playing WoW long beyond we would otherwise have got bored of it was it was a game we shared - a game we not only played together but a game we played with a wide array other people. And we're both big Star Wars nerds, and big fans of Bioware games, so Star Wars: The Old Republic was like a big gaming lighthouse, calling us in.