Put this in a ticket to Bioware tbh. I'm sure that this is a new and interesting perspective that no one has really championed yet.

He's one of our better companions and all - and long overdue relief from Mako - but it is definitely a writing fail. The bounty hunter story has a lot of places where you get railroaded into doing dishonorable/heinous things like this regardless of your established light morality. Which is why I think that the bounty hunter story is best played dark, because that way you don't really suffer that moral dissonance in the narrative when you hit these railroad moments. Playing a bad person who does what he wants gives you a freedom to interpret things the way you want to, whereas playing a character with more rigid moral values who randomly turns into a fraud/terrorist/cop-killer/whathaveyou at various points throughout the story is very difficult for me to enjoy.

Very much this. It is an extremely useful tool if you use it right, proactively rather than defensively. Civil war especially has so many places where stealth scan is invaluable.

The pyrotech tree doesn't have to be dropped so that you can play a recolour of classes that are already in the game. What you want is the trooper class. Wanting other people to lose their spec of choice so that you can have an aesthetic duplicate of an existing republic class is kind of an unsustainable idea.

lawl. So in one thread, you 1) refer to sidearms as "wimpy", and 2) proudly start spouting pirate rhetoric. Excuse me while I carefully reread everything you said to absorb as much wisdom from your posts as possible. It is so rare that I am privileged with the chance to read petulant demands driven by bratty prepubescent logic.

What a fascinating new thread.

Playing the story all the way to Belsavis with Mako on your ship must have been torture for you then.

If Tormen wasn't a contract, then none of the BH jobs were. He's our employer for the whole of act three. We do jobs for him, we take his money and make use of his resources. That constitutes a professional relationship, and one wherein Tormen upheld his side of the bargain quite honourably. Yes yes you hated him. That has jack to do with honour though. Honour isn't about who you hate and who like, or about who is a good guy and who is a bad guy. Honour - for bounty hunters anyway - is about professionalism and consistency. Honour isn't mindless lightsiding. Betraying your employer in favour of the target is just as dishonourable whether your employer is a sith you eats babies or if he's a virtuous caretaker at an orphanage who hires you to pick up a sick kid's birthday cake. You don't get to pick and choose which of your employers get the benefit of your professional loyalty and call it "honourable". You can hate Tormen all you like and justify killing him however you like. Fair play I think that killing him is daft in the extreme, because you break contract and potentially alienate the Imperial hierarchy that serves as your main client base based only on a guy who screwed you over saying "pwease", but a lot of hunter players like the chaotic neutral shtick so that's fair enough. But the OP mentions honour, and you can't seriously call this kind of random, flip-a-coin betrayal of an employer "honourable" if you understand what the word means.

What exactly is "honourable" about betraying your employer just because the target says "pwetty pwease"? Tormen is a bad guy and Janarus is a good guy. OK. But flipping on a contract is flipping on a contract.

Alas, another game fails because of its amateurish refusal to provide players with one scrap of cloth to hang from their shoulder. I'm sure this issue will go down in MMO history as one of the key failures that sunk the TORtanic. Actually, no.

No! No no no no NO! No Ewoks! No! []quote]Or as a force user companion. Would be nice to get force sensetive Gormak from Voss if you decide to help Gormak King. Honestly, just a normal gormak would be cool. Gormak are awesome. Difficult to justify though.

That's not how the game is built.

Problem is that we don't just play any hunter, who play a very specific hunter who works extremely closely with the Empire and is very well known. That makes for problems if we had a rogue Jedi or Sith following us. It isn't something that would be tolerated by the people we work for, nor is it something we could reasonably hide. And while you can have convoluted blackmail stories and the like to justify why a Jedi or Sith is a companion, there will never be a very organic reason why such a person chooses to dick around with a bounty hunter while both orders are engaged in a massive conflict. And honestly such a companion has nothing to offer our narrative; Jedi and Sith stories are covered to death, and adding one to the bounty hunter wouldn't be the slightest bit interesting. An untrained force adept of some sort - an alien shaman or the like - would be much more in keeping with the rest of the bounty hunter's crew, be another angle of lore that could be told in the game, and be included meaningfully without stretching plausibility. Juda will never be a companion. Companions are the same for everyone, but Juda can be killed by the player in the class story. They aren't going to negate player choices to resurrect a minor forgettable character and force her on everyone. If they were to add a female twi'lek (doubtful, because Vette exists already) it would be a new character.

- A female DS romance option. Ideally non-human. I'd like it to be a force adept (not a trained jedi/sith for obvious reasons) sort of like Vector, to use Willpower as primary stat and have healing abilities to offer an alternative to Mako. - A droid of some sort. I'm really not picky. Would have liked an assassin droid, but with the HK-51 coming out that would be a bit redundant. Reckon it would be cool to have a reprogrammed imperial interrogation droid (the big ones, not those small probes you buy at the dark side vendor) to mirror JK's astromech droid. The idea of an evil, floating R2-D2 programmed for cruelty and prejudice is amusing to me.

Then you weren't paying attention to the whole story. I could go into more detail with spoilers to point out to you where the story railroads you into terrorism and cop-killing, but there is no way you could have missed the fraud thing if you've played bounty hunter to any significant level.

Oh certainly, traditional morality and lawfulness are very different from codes of honor. If it was just that, I'd be able to appreciate the distinction. But the story forces you to violate that, as well. Which rather blows any notion of professional honor, warrior's integrity, or Mandalorian values out of the water, right along with traditional morality.

Again, not really. You have certain choices which you can use to frame your bounty hunter as someone who is nice, friendly, and swayed by sympathy. But no matter how light you play your character, the story forces you into dishonour, lawlessness, and terrorism. You have to do a lot of mental gymnastics and subscribe to some very flexible moral values in order to call any player character bounty hunter who has finished the class story a good person, imo. If you listed the hunter's actions and attributed them to a real person, you'd have one of the most despised villains in the world. Which is why I think the story makes a lot more sense if you play dark. If you are the kind of person who analyses the story and your choices in it, anyhow. Playing dark, your choices gel with the narrative railroad and you come out looking like a consistent, albeit brutal, anti-hero at the end. Playing light gives you a character who can only be considered criminally insane, as if he's two different people.

Problem is that while that makes sense on paper, it isn't how it works out in the bounty hunter storyline. The storyline will force your character to violate most common perceptions of honor and morality. Unless your character has an extremely twisted, convoluted sense of honor that still holds things like "fraud", "terrorism", and a host of other unnecessary vile acts your hunter commits all in the name of money and fame, as being honorable pursuits.

Personally, I think dark side has MUCH more consistent storytelling. Trying to play my second hunter as light always frustrates me into stopping. If you are a dark side hunter, you do bad things for selfish reasons and the story paints you as an anti-hero. If you are light side hunter, you do bad things for hypocritical reasons but you are polite and gentle. "Honour" should make a difference, but it doesn't.

This is an exciting new idea.

What I hate about our companion itemization are the trivial weapon categories. What possible reason is there fore a "techstaff" and an "electrostaff" being different categories of weapon? Torian can't use an electrostaff, he has to use a techstaff, causing me to spend way more time, effort, and credits on getting a weapon for him than I otherwise would. And it makes no sense.

Well, because we don't have Baldur's Gate II style event horizon moments where the character says "change how we operate as a group or I'm leaving", so that our companions in TOR just put up with however we act, it is a bit moot. To one level or another, you can justify that they stay with you no matter what... but it certainly isn't elegantly done on the narrative's part. So I guess it depends on just how much sense you expect it to make that they stay with you. In some cases, it makes precious little sense at all. In the vein, I don't think Mako is well written at all, because regardless of whether you play light or dark, your bounty hunter is strong-armed by the narrative into doing heinous things regardless. You can be a full on lightside hunter but you will still end the story as a murderer, terrorist, fraud, and cop-killer. Mako is very clear in her moral alignment in those instances where you do get a choice, but in the instances where the narrative chooses for you (or all your choices lead to the same immoral acts, merely with different dialogue in between) her moral values are suddenly "off". So one moment you have Mako praising/reviling your moral decision making, but the next moment you are railroaded into doing something heinous that should seriously bother Mako and make her rethink the fact that she's following you around, but she doesn't comment unless there is a light/dark choice involved. The end result is that you can be a fully lightside hunter with Mako's respect and adoration, who is nevertheless a terrorist, fraud, and cop-killer... and that Mako doesn't mind the seriously bad stuff you have done so long as you are fwendly and nice. It is *extremely* shallow writing and very obviously a consequence of the ham fisted way that TOR is written to give the illusion of choice while keeping you firmly on rails.

Mako annoyed the **** out of me from start to finish. - Her view of bounty hunting isn't principled, it is extremely naive. She seems to me as if she has some kind of Star Wars variant of Stockholme syndrome, but her super-goody perspective on the profession is reflected nowhere and in no one. - She is extremely hypocritical. She preaches professionalism when professionalism means lightside points, i.e. not betraying someone for more money, but she throws professionalism out the window when professionalism means darkside points, i.e. wanting you to turn on and kill your employer pro bono because your target said "pretty please" and made puppy dog eyes. - Without spoiling the story too specifically, the bounty hunter story WILL force you to do bad things. By the time you finish the story you are, among other things, a terrorist and a cop-killer. What this means in connection with Mako is that her continued loyalty to your hunter stretches plausibility at times; when you are offered light-dark choices, she leans extremely heavily to the light and absolutely hates most dark side choices, but in situations where you aren't given a moral choice and the narrative forces you to do bad things anyway then her previously hyper sensitive conscience takes a nap and she doesn't have anything to say. All told I find her role in the story completely jarring and I hate that I'm stuck with her.

Yeah I rejected him too. Took immense satisfaction when he had a ragefit over it; apparently people don't reject his cult to his face all that often. That the other champions approved was gravy. I find it fairly amusing, in a weird way, how other companions are baffled by the decision. There's a conversation with Torian where he asks you why you reject Mandalore, as if it was a no-brainer. Little disappointed that the conversation doesn't have better eplies to Torian. I think your options there are 1) I didn't want him giving me orders, 2) I dunno, and 3) mind your own business. I was looking for 4) "no duh, I didn't agree on the spot to join a foreign culture / cult that requires me to learn a new bloody language and adopt a new set of values just because some bloke offers me a spot in his clubhouse, maybe because I'm not a crazy person who bases major life choices on whimsy". I do take some pleasure out of not giving mandalorians the reverential fanworship they seem to expect from the rest of the bounty hunter community.

I think quite a few issues were rushed and used prematurely. The war turning hot is one of them, Malgus' story arc is another, as are the outcome of the conflicts on the contested planets, especially Corellia, and the whole Karagga the Hutt story (which had far too small an impact). Just in a few short months; Characters and concepts that could have fueled years of compelling storytelling have been used up and thrown away in the very first stage of the game's life, meaning that Bioware is going to have to introduce new story arcs in a similarly unsatisfying rush. I don't think that the story is being paced well at all.