I don't understand why people feel the need to live in a bubble, closed off from the world to protect themselves from mild inconvenience.

The NPCs also constantly infect the player. Are the NPCs capable of harassing players?

I agree. All the good names I want are taken. They should have switched to a system where your legacy name gets appended to your character name or use the @soandso like they do in Star Trek Online. The tiny amount of confusion is an acceptable tradeoff for letting everyone get the name they want. ANd no, double naming isn't an acceptable solution. A character name should be like a first name and only be a single word. There is also a common pattern to the names used in all languages such that there is actually a great deal of similarity. Names are things by which people use to identify and call out to each other so they must be quick and easy. The social pressures which led the names used in every major human language would be the same social pressures constraining names used by nonhumans too. Also I'm still pissed that i lost Femshep in the one of the name purges.

I hear that some games have these things called quests and you get gear from completing these quests. RNG loot makes sense in games like Diablo but wouldn't really make sense in a tight story focused game like Baldur's Gate 2. But to be honest SWTOR from day one has never had a good system. In fact they've all been downright terrible. The point in my life when I was interested in a gear chase ended before SWTOR even began.

I played to about level 15 and stopped. Every problem I remembered from vanilla was there. It was just as bad as I remembered it being. GOD AWFUL poorly implemented nonsensical poorly thought out game mechanics, LACK of necessary quality of life features like group finder, quest information (which means that every tom dick and harry was running around with a quest mod because as it turns out almost all people want that information), complete lack of anything to do at end game if you didn't want to either raid or pvp (and the pvp is completely imbalanced poop) basically everything. A game that is a mile wide but an inch deep since you can only interact with the game at the most superficial and pointless level by killing meaningless respawns. The only improved change was the lack of feeling of needing to rush rush rush. WoW just became way too busy with each new expansion to the point where there were 8 billion things you feel you needed to do every day in order to avoid missing out but most of them were double plus unfun. "Another turtle made it to the water".

Ashara. So much Ashara. Just what you'd expect from the best duelist in her class.

Uh what? What does that even mean?

Because as everyone knows, the good guys are people who keep slaves, torture, kill others, and are encouraged to engage in completely immoral activities. Just because you call yourself good doesn't make you good. If your actions are those of an evil person then you are evil regardless of what you call yourself. It's one thing to be a poor Imperial farmer just struggling to make end's meet and another to be a member of the Dark Council. I won't begrudge the former from bending the knee to an evil government but I will certainly for the latter.

Qyen is a terrible character who makes no sense for the Consular to have as a companion. Qyzen kills for sport. The Jedi are against killing, even for necessity in many circumstances.

Because one writer who was salty about not getting his way in the actual game got to have his way in a separate spinoff book. Most of the people responsible for KOTOR's story left and then that one writer had the power to force his incorrect flawed vision on the writing staff. KOTOR makes much more sense if you consider Revan to be a girl because that explains why Malak fell. He fell because he gave in to love, the one corrupting emotion that Jedi are most warned against. Malak followed his lover Revan even though he was aware from the start that what they were doing was wrong. He followed Revan because his love for Revan overpowered all his other considerations. Just as Kotor 2's protagonist makes vastly more sense as a man than a woman. Attris was very clearly the jilted lover. Everything she did was so obviously done because she felt that the love of her life abandoned her by abandoning the Jedi. When he shoved that lightsaber into the pedestal in front of the Jedi Council Attris felt like he had shoved that lightsaber into her own heart.

I repeat all the SIth and Jedi stories but I have not ever completed a story for a non Jedi/Sith because they just don't interest me. They are way too generic. If I wanted a story about a person who shoots a gun I could find a much better RPG elsewhere for that with way better gameplay. The only interesting and unique thing about Star Wars revolves around the Force.

One: we don't need to represent all people. Everytime you forcefully represent one person in a role then you are preventing every other person from being represented in that role. For example if there is a protagonist who is trans then everyone who isn't trans is no longer capable of considering themselves represented by that trans protagonist because they aren't trans. Two: if the character is a good representation of a transperson then you shouldn't even know they are trans. They should want to be considered the gender they are trying to be and shouldn't want to be known as a transperson instead. To quote the god satellite from Futurama: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." Three: Krem is offensive to everyone with a brain but not because Krem is trans but because Krem was an offensive violation of Qunari lore and philosophy. The Qunari society is essentially a fictionally realized version of the imaginary civilization discussed by Socrates in The Republic. Each person is born to fill a role and they are born with a BODY AND MIND suited to filling that role. All members of the Qunari are content to fill the role to which they were born to fill: To quote Sten on Qunari philosophy and society when he was comparing Ferelden to his homeland: "[n]o one has a place here. Your farmers wish to be merchants. The merchants dream of being nobles, and the nobles become warriors. No one is content to be who they are." If you play as a female character then Sten is surprised you are allowed to fight and are capable of fighting. From Sten's point of view every person born with a uterus has always been content and wanted to fulfill a woman's role (I do not remember the precise roles women held in Qunari society because it has been over a decade since I played DA:O). It is only towards the end of the game that Sten is ready to acknowledge that he might have been wrong for thinking you are unsuitable to fight on the front lines because you're a woman. Having Krem be a woman who wants to be regarded as a man contradicts the established lore from Dragon Age: Origins. I mean Krem wasn't the worst thing about DA:I but it is an example of the ridiculous amount of inconsistency between DA:I and the two prior games.

Sidious wouldn't fight Revan at all. Sidious was focused on gaining power through political machinations. He was elected through the normal and legitimate legal processes, first as a Senator for Naboo and then the Supreme Chancellor. Sidious was perfectly content to manipulate events from the shadows for several decades to see his carefully concocted plan through to fruition. Revan was focused on gaining power through military force and was a much more focused on immediate results. While Revan was a brilliant tactician and strategist she was not presented as a figure who was willing to sit back and let events play out for a decade. So one would imagine that Revan would gain power only to lose it 20 years later when Sidious's plan came to fruition. And yes, Revan was very clearly a girl. That nonsense book contradicts KOTOR the game and completely fails to understand the character.

Because they totally have the money to pay 16 more voice actors to record that much voicework? This would be a project with a guaranteed negative RoI. The team has already realized that they need to reduce the number of voice actors, not increase them.

Frankly I think that the Kotor version looks much, much better. At least the low poly and low pixel armor is justified by the fact that Kotor is an older game, SWTOR can't use that excuse.

You are the traitor.

Mirialan are best suited for every class. In fact all my characters are Mirialan using the 7 or 9 face. Those are the only faces that look realistic. The others just look awful and unrealistic. But they are especially good looking female Consulars for some reason. Something about the female Consular's voice and the Mirialan 7 face go really well together. Lore wise you to choose Kinetic Combat because a Jedi shouldn't be made out of paper. They are supposed to be incredibly great at defending themselves.

Such as the godawful new aoe missile animation for tank Bounty Hunters? Or the removal of Force Lightning from Sith Assassins even though Force Lightning was the most symbolic class ability? The replacement is truly horrible. It is you punching the air with your fist while you double cast the lame instant lightning ability that I never liked in the first place. I was going to make a new Sith Assassin but the removal of Force Lightning was a complete nonstarter and the Sith Sorceror class feels more like a WoW mage than a Star Wars Sith.

Now that I'm the Empress I'm ready to go conquer other galaxies. The whole "push Malgus over the ledge" crap was one of the most stupid things in SWTOR at that time. We had no reason not to simply cut his head off and there was no reason why we couldn't just cut his head off. I am wielding a friggin lightsaber, not some silly foam bat. Believing that silliness to be a presage of things to come was one of the reasons why I unsubbed to SWTOR in the first place. Turns out I was right. While KotFE and KotET were poorly executed, the intent and necessity of creating a combined story were the right sentiment. Even in Kotor there was a general underpinning that both the Sith and the Jedi were wrong as they were too extreme. Kotor was the story about a woman, Revan, who wanted to conquer the Republic as she believed that she could do better than the Senate when the Senate proved completely ineffective at stopping the Mandalorian threat despite the Mandalorians consisting of nothing more than a small number of soldiers living on a small moon. KotET is the realization of Revan's dream.

I don't think all of the SWTOR romances are devoid of chemistry though. Some of the vanilla romances DID give me the feels. The problem I have is with the current characters, Lana and Theron et al. You don't have any real shared moments with the characters. You don't grow with the characters. All those moments happened back in Vanilla. These new characters constantly pop into and out of existence. You don't spend 4 planets chasing after Lana, beating down her master and convincing her to join you because you actually have a good heart and only pretend to be evil to fit in while her master actually has an evil heart and only pretends to be good to fit in with the other Jedi. Lana is simply there to give you information and then effectively disappears once she has given you the information. The information she gives you isn't even that interesting or useful. She doesn't tell jokes, she doesn't open up her heart to you and weep over how hard it is to try convincing all the other Sith in the Empire to stop being so bloody and pointlessly evil. She is never constantly being afraid of being stabbed in the back by someone gunning for her position. She gives you no reason to care about her and asks for no reason to care about you. She simply suddenly cares about you because Chapter 2 requires her to suddenly care about you. If she were to suddenly die of a heart attack I'd feel nothing. Lana is a character written by a person who is more interested in the things going on than in the characters and their motivations. Theron is the same.

No. The Non Force Using classes we already are already a huge blight on the game, adding more just makes the problem worse. Plus the "Engineer" class is always the most ruinous one because the concept makes no bloody sense. Especially in Guild Wars 2. The "turrets" that the engineer places are turrets that need to be hand cranked to work,but the Engineer doesn't hand crank them. They just place them and somehow the turret is hand cranked and aimed by absolutely nothing. That class ruins the game because it is so ridiculously stupid and such a violation of the setting.

Balmorra because it is the only planet I like on both Empire and Republic. Tython is my favorite Republic planet and Balmorra is my all time favorite Empire planet. Republic Taris is nice if incredibly silly, Empire Taris is horribly stupid. The Republic trying to colonize a planet full of monsters that will you into a monster if you so much as get scratched is a terrible idea. Letting the Republic waste troops, resources and people on Taris would do much more for the Empire than having the Empire waste troops and resources trying to mess with the Republic. I've always felt that the Empire forcing the Republic to leave Taris actually benefitted the Republic as it was impossibly stupid for the Republic to try recolonizing a planet full of Rakhghouls before they even had a treatment for the Rakhghoul plague.

That wouldn't work for every character. See you can't tell people that they are the most special person in the galaxy, have that person be the sole individual who solves every one of the galaxy's problems for 4 years, and then suddenly turn around and make them second fiddle. If you want someone to be a generic grunt in your story then you have to start them out being a generic grunt from the beginning. You cannot give them the expectation and then the realization of the expectation for 4 years and then turn around and sweep out the rug from underneath them. There is nothing wrong with everyone playing a story that sets them up as the Empress of the galaxy. After all if this were a single player game you'd have no objection. Each person who plays the story is playing a version of the world state where the other players don't actually exist on the same level as that person's PC. Just because you as a player know that every other person as a player will play through their own world state with their own character that becomes empress doesn't meant that the other player's world state occurs in the same world state as yours. You are taking out of character knowledge and then trying to believe that another player's worldstate is your worldstate and surely it is impossible for there to be two empresses of the same empire. Your character doesn't know what her stats are, she doesn't know that bosses can stand there and take hit after hit for no explainable reason because they use cheat codes that make them immune to CCs and give them cheating unrealistic stats. You know there is a quest in the mountains, but your character doesn't. She has to talk to the peasant in order to discover that the goblin tribe living in the mountains has been acting up lately and terrorizing the farmers. The fact that you see 30 other characters walking up to the same peasant doesn't mean that everyone is going to solve the goblin problem before your character gets there. You should instead treat those 30 other PCs as background NPCs, doing nothing more than adding some variety to the background. You have to keep out of character knowledge as out of character knowledge.

I don't want or need Nadia returned to me in a nonsense chapter. I just want her to return to me and then have us sit down and have a heartfelt conversation.

That's promising. Bioware is at its best when working on a new IP rather than trying to force out a DA:3 or a ME4. Both of which they did do and both of which were of low quality. The artists need to be able to let their creative juices flow! Something they can't really do when they are shackled to a 6+ year old IP.