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Aurondarklord

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  1. Personally, I really like Corso, mechanically he's a good tough tank and while yes the harpoon gun can sometimes be annoying, it can also be useful as hell a lot of other times, especially if you're a scoundrel, which I am, and can't engage as well at long range. In terms of his personality, I find him endearing and appropriate to my character. admittedly, he's got nothing on Vette and her fall-out-of-chair-laughing snark lines, but he's a likeable hick and a good straight man to my smuggler's funny man. Of course, this largely comes down to how you play your smuggler, and I think one of the biggest weaknesses of the companion system is that you can get a first companion whose personality totally clashes with your character and you're stuck in affection-hell for 20 levels. I think at the very least each class's first companion should support the "default" personality of that class, AKA the star wars character they take after. In the case of the Smuggler that's of course Han Solo and if you basically play as Han, you and Corso will get along just fine, so they've succeeded in that regard. Corso is fundamentally a light side companion though. If you play dark side, don't expect to get along with him. That doesn't make him a weak or badly designed character. Nor is Corso sexist, he's just "old-fashioned" and tries to be a gentleman. If you're a male smuggler, which I am, Corso falls into the role of your bro/buddy/wingman, and does it very well. If you're female...well then yes I can see his jealousy getting annoying, but us guys are in the same boat with Risha. Hell, we're not even together yet, in fact she's sarcastically deflected all my advances so far, but I still get -affection whenever I flirt with anyone else. Talk about the queen of mixed signals! Like every companion in the game, Corso works well with some character personalities and not so well with others. My guy is basically...a mix of Nathan Drake, Mal Reynolds, and Neal Caffery, a smooth talking, adventure loving, vaguely crooked space cowboy with a heart of gold and a girl in every spaceport...and the only real problem I've had with Corso is when he objects to my character smuggling spice in a few quests. Come on Bioware, you gave the smuggler a first companion that objects when they actually smuggle something?! Relatively minor concern in the scheme of things though.
  2. Any argument about who is more powerful between Vitiate and Palpatine is fairly pointless because, let's face it, they're essentially the same character. Mind, I'm not saying they're literally the same person though some people have speculated that, I'm saying Vitiate is a thematic stand-in for Palpatine. The selling point of this game is immersion in the familiar, beloved setting of the star wars galaxy. Though we can't directly interact with the characters we all grew up with because they won't be born for another 3600 years, a lot of the major NPCs (and PCs) are designed to resemble them. Darth Malgus deliberately looks like Darth Vader and fills a similar story niche. The player character smuggler is a knock-off of Han Solo with a ship that looks similar to the millenium falcon. the player character bounty hunter has the same armor and abilities as boba fett. etc, etc, etc. Similarly, the emperor is designed to remind the player of Palpatine as much as possible, primarily to make the Jedi Knight player feel like they're actually Luke Skywalker. Yes the novels and stuff play him up and flesh out the character with this unique "cosmic horror" cthulhu vibe he has, but in the game proper, he is basically a palpatine knock-off. trying to compare power levels between one character and another character blatantly made to emulate him is a waste of time.
  3. I think maybe they have less flirt options for females because they figure chicks will get shot down a lot less. so like if you have 5 flirt options for a male character and 5 for a female, the male character might get an actual sex scene once, while the female character will probably get at least 4 out of 5. Let's face it, men and women are wired different in that regard. and they don't want a million sex scenes in the game for female characters cuz that might jack up the rating of the game. so they have less flirt options for females. I'd be more interested to hear somebody actually count up how many "fade to black" scenes there are for each class/gender instead of just counting flirt lines. Cuz I played a male sith warrior 1-50 and, aside from companion romance, I think I had a grand total of ONE sex scene, with Darth Lachris on Balmorra. Every other time I flirted I got shot down. I dunno if this is influenced by alignment, cuz my SW is full dark and I imagine most women aren't interested in banging a mass murderer with a puffy grey monster face full of black veins.
  4. So...I've noticed a pretty big story imbalance between the two factions. Republic class stories are about fighting the empire, Empire class stories...much much less about fighting the republic, at least in terms of their ultimate outcomes. Jedi Knight and Jedi Consular both deal major direct blows to the Emperor by defeating various pieces of his being Smuggler yoinks an entire fleet out from under the empire's nose, and can choose between setting it against everyone or giving it to the republic, either way a blow to the empire Trooper either kills or captures the empire's greatest general, either taking him out of the picture, or trading him back to the empire for the release of thousands of POWs, either way a major victory for the republic against the empire. Then what have we got on the other side? Both Sith classes are about Sith infighting, "kill your master and take his place" kind of stories, the final boss is a rival Sith. Imperial Agent is a combination of empire vs third party villain that's on neither side, and sane imperial intelligence chafing under the rule of its totally bizarro sith overlords. only the bounty hunter feels like he strikes a real blow against the republic at the end of his story, killing a very important jedi and having the option to kill the supreme chancellor. even there though, only the dark side bounty hunter does this, while the light side hunter turns against the sith for another empire vs empire final boss. Sure, there are various points where all of the classes come up against the other faction's forces, but outside the bounty hunter, it's never really the centerpiece of the story for the empire classes, where it is for ALL of the republic classes. I signed up for the empire wanting aggression and war! please give me more opportunities in future story content to undermine democracy, crush freedom, and grind the republic under the Emperor's almighty heel.
  5. A couple points... First off, I think what the OP's actual point is, if you sift through it all is not "this shouldn't be in the game" so much as "why isn't this covered with more realism and sensitivity?" To which I sort of...agree and disagree. On the one hand, more depth would always be nice, can't ever argue with that. On the other hand, you can't ask Bioware to put 5x as much attention into the storyline with this one companion than all the others. the majority of ALL companion stories are told simply through a series of about 15 short conversations, and maybe a few more detailed interactions during class quests. I WISH there were more, because I love the companion system, but there's only so much they can include in an MMO where they have to write 8 of these stories and create all the other content. This game went SO over budget and over deadline as it is. There's only so much time they can put into fleshing out Vette's perspective. Within those restraints, and the restraints that they can't have companions be able to leave you for mechanical reasons, I feel they've done a fairly good job. As for realism...ironically, the very rating you ask them to increase PREVENTS them from doing that. Vette's slavery is a dumbed down, glossed over fantasy version of slavery, just like blasters and lightsabers are a dumbed down, glossed over fantasy version of violence. you either die immediately, die in a few seconds of gurgling if you get force choked, or get tossed in a kolto tank to fully recover. or maybe you get a cybernetic limb. We don't see the nightmarish horror of a man whose chest has been blown apart by a shotgun blast, we don't see the fallout of war on the families of the dead and the crippled, we don't even see blood because blasters and lightsabers cauterize injuries. And there's an argument to be made that portraying real evils like violence or slavery in a way that glosses over their true horrors is a bad thing, that it desensitizes our culture and leads us to turn a blind eye, where a more shocking depiction would make us take a harder look at ourselves and maybe improve us as people. However, as it currently stands, the realistic, shocking version gets you an M rating and tons of media controversy, while the glossed over version is T for Teen and makes a lot less waves. If they showed it the way you want it shown, it WOULD be rated M. Finally, and this is a point nobody has brought up that I've seen so far...Vette is a criminal. She's a plunky, fun, loveable criminal, but she's objectively a thief and a pirate. In the real world, her actions would land her in prison, probably for quite a while, bad childhood excuse or not. She was caught breaking into one of the Sith's most holy archaeological sites, not for any noble reason, but just to steal. Imagine if someone were caught breaking into the Vatican and stealing a priceless relic from the life of christ. This person would be reviled by our society. Serious jail time would follow, even more serious than if they'd simply stolen a jewel of equal value from a museum, because they'd so offended our sensibilities. Some religious people might even attempt vigilante violence thinking jail wasn't enough. And that's the equivalent of what Vette did that got her into this position in the first place. SHOULD she really be immediately released from her shock collar and forgiven? Doesn't she deserve at least some measure of punishment. As much as you can argue that the darkest dark side outcome (Vette spends the rest of her life a collared, mistreated slave) is too severe, you can equally argue that the lightest light side outcome (Vette is simply released by the warrior immediately and gets a cushy job on their crew) is too lenient.
  6. ESRB ratings take into account only what is directly depicted in the game, they do not "read between the lines", so to speak. What is shown with Vette and the shock collar is not INHERENTLY sexual (with the exception of the post-marriage, consensual implied use of it). She never makes flirty comments or bondage jokes after being shocked, none of the lines your character uses when he or she shocks her are suggestive. There is no sexual violence in that, just plain old fashioned violence. If you choose to assume that your character is a sexual sadist and is getting off on torturing Vette, that's your prerogative as a role player, but it's not directly part of the game. With regards to the aspect of having sex with Lady Grathan and forcing Vette to be involved, I think some people are taking that the wrong way and reading in connotations that weren't intended. It's a canonical fact that Vette was NOT forced to participate in a threesome, you can romance her after that, and she will still say she's a virgin when you get married. As for making her watch, once again, if you assume that your sith warrior enjoys making Vette watch him have sex with other women, that's something you read into your character, not something Bioware directly included. The dialogue was something like "Vette never leaves my side", not "I want her to watch". The way that line was written more suggests that your character does not trust Lady Grathan enough to want to be alone with her, which isn't unreasonable, she just had you kill the last man she slept with, who's to say she won't tie up loose ends? Thus, you have Vette stay as your bodyguard. She's icked out by having to, but it's not inherently misogynistic, bodyguards (who in the real world are mostly men) have been protecting their masters during, and cleaning up after, their vices since the dawn of civilization, look at any third world dictator. Can you imagine what THEIR bodyguards have to stomach seeing?
  7. You know, I pretty much agree there. I think that in place of the scripted sequence in the SW story where the betrayal should come from the companion you have the least affection with, which is probably Vette if you kept her collared, or perhaps default to Vette if you kept her collared. and she's like "yeah, you're an a hole, Baras offered to remove the collar if I killed you". That would frankly be a better story than how they currently have it, albeit probably harder to code. I think though the main reason for lack of consequences is gameplay limitations. This isn't a singleplayer game where you go through the story and done, these characters are persistent, many people will likely play them for years to come, and the history of games like this pretty clearly shows that when choices you make early on can mechanically gimp your character permanently, make them have inferior stats to other players playing the same class, people get frustrated and quit because they feel like the work they've put into their character is now for nothing. Look at the way some people already game light side/dark side choices or companion affection because they don't care about story and just want maximum points. If they started having it so companions could turn on you if they felt mistreated or didn't like how you do things, it wouldn't be very long before some player figured out the correct set of decisions for each class that kept every companion loyal and gave maximum mechanical benefit, and this became the "right" way to play your class. And just like back in WOW guilds and groups, the moment such "right" ways to play emerged started to discriminate against players who didn't have the "right" talent build or the "right" professions, we would start to see players who lacked all their companions or otherwise had played their character the "wrong" way denied admission, which would be a very bad thing for a game that's supposed to be about role playing and making choices. This kind of thing is largely the reason they removed all options that allowed you to kill companions early in beta. So yeah, consequences for your choices are great, as long as they're purely story-based consequences and don't have a mechanical impact. To speak from my own personal experience for a moment though... When I bought this game, I was pretty used to morality systems in games being kinda bad. simplistic, cheesy, not always consistent, likely to shoehorn you into being a saint or a psycho if you want maximum benefit. And there are certainly plenty of instances in this game where I felt that was the case, that the moral choices presented were out of context, or contradicted what earlier moral choices had said was the right thing. for example there are lots of other such situations, where you are given light side points simply for NOT murdering someone you had no reason whatsoever to murder at all, where punishing someone is considered dark side regardless of whether they deserve punishment, even one instance where killing an NPC on the grounds they're too dangerous to live is considered light side, when in every single other situation where such choices came up, that was the dark side option. So, basically expecting that kind of stuff, I decided I was gonna play a full dark side sith warrior essentially for laughs. Ignore whether the morality system was plausible or well written, and just be a totally unrealistic moustache-twirling maniac and laugh at how hammy this would come off. And for the most part that's what I've done and still do. I'm dark V, I've killed or belittled almost everyone I've met, I'm romancing Jaesa and snickering at what psychotic babies those two will produce. And when I first got Vette, I pushed the shock option every time it came up and laughed. But then something happened about halfway through Dromund Kaas...I realized I was starting to get attached to this girl. She was cute and plucky and fun, well written and well voice acted and I liked her, and I started finding myself looking for ways I could "justify" being nice to her to my character's personality. I took the collar off her after Balmorra, the first time it gave me the option without giving me light side points, rationalizing that my character would approve of her begging instead of trying to sass him, and that even he would finally see her hard work as deserving of reward. I even found him giving her a couple of compliments or kind words now and then. If there's any speck of something decent or human in my malicious monster, she'll be the one to reach it. And the fact the game managed to evoke that kind of emotional reaction from me that it actually helped shape how I play? brilliant writing, it would be a damn crime to censor that for the sake of being politically correct.
  8. I actually just learned this because my warrior is with Jaesa and this thread made me wanna look up the Vette romance, Vette is explicitly NOT a sex slave. if you romance her, she at one point tells you she's a virgin because she promised her mother she'd save it for marriage. So Vette's slavery is not and has never been sexual in nature. Sadly, her bustier sister did not escape such a fate, but the game portrays it in an appropriately negative light...I have no problem with a game depicting a social ill that exists in the real world, so long as it doesn't appear to endorse it, and this game in no way endorses it. Also, regarding what you said about Quinn...I totally agree with the basic thrust of what you're saying, but maybe Quinn's not the best example in the game, since so a relationship where you're abusing Quinn is actually pretty dysfunctional both ways. The sith are essentially a noble class, only distinguished from the commoners by force sensitivity instead of land ownership or money. and then you have the Emperor, who more resembles some sort of devil figure than anything in human history, his evil is so utterly alien and so cosmic in scope. Which is to say, the Empire is a generic, sometimes slightly cartoonish distillation of evil regimes and oppression in general, much as one could say Mordor and Sauron are.
  9. this is the scene in question. Actually, when you think about it, it doesn't even necessarily suggest if her idea is for you to use it on her or her to use it on you.
  10. Am I the only one who's noticed that the planet story for Alderaan is an exact copy of the story in the novel series "A Song of Fire and Ice", AKA the TV show Game of Thrones? Panteer = Targaryen, the former royal house, recently deposed in a bloody coup, reduced to only a few survivors in hiding from the new regime Ulgo = Baratheon, the noble house that seized power for the right reasons but has made a total mess of it before falling apart, leaving two other noble houses to fight over the scraps Organa = Stark, one of the two main contenders for the crown, generally depicted as the good guys who have been forced to seek it to survive and otherwise would have been content to remain vassals to the rightful monarchs Thul = Lannister, the other main contender for the crown, generally depicted as bad guys who are attempting take advantage of the chaos caused by the downfall of the rightful monarchs to usurp the throne for themselves Order of Extermination = Night's Watch, an ancient brotherhood that has forsworn house ties and politics to devote themselves to battling an ancient evil that threatens the entire world, once an army, now only a handful of them remain when they are needed most Killiks/joiners = Others (white walkers)/wights, an ancient, almost forgotten menace that threatens the entire world, though the noble houses are too busy fighting each other to notice it.
  11. Vette is only sexualized if you choose to make her so. But, of course, you can sexualize any character in the game that you have control over. I can have my pink skinned sith pureblood marauder dancing around in his skivvies in the middle of Vaiken if I want to. I can dress Jaesa, my psychotic apprentice, up in the slave Leia bikini, and because it's moddable and she wears light armor anyway, actually fight effectively with her like this. If players want to be pervs, they will find a way to be, as either gender and any race or faction. They did it with night elf mailbox dancing too. The story itself does not do anything to especially sexualize Vette, her default clothing options are not particularly revealing, her dialog is only suggestive if you pursue her romance option, which is true of every companion. In fact, Bioware made it so that you can only pursue the romance option with her if you remove the shock collar, to AVOID the implication that her slavery is sexual in nature. The only instance of the shock collar being referenced in any sexual light is after you and Vette get married, she comments that she still has it, and makes a comment suggesting she'd like to experiment with consensual BDSM involving it, which is kinky, but harmless. At this point in the story, mind you, she has risen from slavery to become the wife and right hand smuggler of one of the most powerful and important lords in the Empire, rather mirroring your own rise from slavery to the Dark Council if you play a Sith Inquisitor, so I don't think her willingness to be a sexual sub in any way denigrates her, it just shows she's not a prude and has a very trusting, comfortable relationship with her husband. I personally see Vette as one of the strongest characters in the game. This girl has been crapped on all of her life, but NOTHING you or anyone else do to her can ever break her snarky, chipper spirit, and she ultimately rises above it and becomes a pretty damn important and capable person in the galactic scheme of things. She doesn't just ride the Sith Warrior's coattails, she's right there on the front lines with him or her, taking all the same risks. Now yes, you can very often in this game be an abusive tool to the same characters you were flirting with two seconds ago. I remember one female guard on Korriban I was allowed to flirt with twice, then I selected an option that said "you've got legs", which I assumed would have my character compliment her shapely legs, but what he actually said was basically "you can walk, go do it yourself". Thana is another good example, you can go back and forth between flirting with her and threatening to murder her. But this problem exists with most games that have dialog choices, in all sorts of contexts. If I want to, I can have my character politely ask NPCs for help and negotiate with them, then turn around and murder them for no reason. I can have my character object to killing on moral grounds right after taking another quest where I murdered everyone involved for fun. Unfortunately if you don't sort of decide ahead of time what your character's personality is like and select dialogue options that match that personality, you can come off as quite bipolar, lol. But once again, this is player choice, if you want to select dialogue options that make no sense following from what you selected before, you can do it, but it produces fairly incoherent writing. As for the issue of buying companion affection and this making them come off as materialistic or suggesting an abusive relationship where you, as the abuser, beat your companion up, then buy her nice things and she immediately forgives you, remember that this same dynamic can take place with any companion regardless of their or your race or gender, it does NOT allow you to progress Vette's companion story without removing the collar. When it comes down to it, companion gifts are an essentially non-canon game mechanic that exists because companion affection has an impact on how fast they do crew skills and such, and players in games like this don't like to be mechanically punished for role playing decisions. So you can use the gifts to max out affection with companions you don't use a lot, or whose personalities conflict with your alignment or dialogue preferences. This is necessary for you to be able to play a character with a coherent personality. If companion gifts were not available, players would have to play their character as having a totally different personality in the presence of each of their companions, or end up with a character that was permanently sub-optimal. Making players choose between RP and min-maxing is a bad design decision. As for this game being darker or more disturbing than what's shown in the actual star wars movies, let's look at some of the things that happened there. In A New Hope, a man tortures his own daughter then commits genocide for no reason, stormtroopers set an elderly couple on fire, and one of the heroes maims someone for getting rowdy with him in a bar. The other movies cover such topics as patricide, child killing, decapitation, and slavery, including Leia's, which IS implied to be sexual, or at least sexually degrading. Don't tell me the Empire isn't full of horrific atrocities or that slavery isn't common in star wars lore (though it's somewhat illogical given the prevalence of droids, who can do a slave's job much better and never rebel). The game certainly presents all this in an appropriately negative light, you get DARK SIDE points for doing it, and can become so evil it starts to actually make you physically ugly. Saying "oh won't someone please think of the children!!" is not appropriate here. This game is rated Teen, young children should not be playing it. by the age of 13, one should be able to expect a person to have a sufficiently developed sense of right and wrong and fantasy and reality that they will not by adversely influenced by having the ability to shock a blue alien in a video game.
  12. This is a false equivalency. If you're light side female JK, your romance option is Doc, if you're dark side male SI, your romance option is...oh wait, you don't have one. This is a fairly major oversight IMO, most classes have four romanceable companions, a dark side man, a dark side woman, a light side man, a light side woman, and then the fifth companion is some weird alien or something. For those who don't, this needs to be fixed. Adding a couple universal companions, and Thana would be a great one, would be a nice way to patch these holes. And for those who chose to kill Thana...they're bringing Darth Maul back in the clone wars series...Palpatine survived death HOW many times? This would hardly be the first time a sith has come back from the dead, or they could go with the "merely a setback", you actually just wounded her and THOUGHT she was dead type thing. Back to the subject of Ashara, I firmly believe that just as a matter of lore and immersion, ALL of the companions who are considered your apprentice/padawan (or the rough equivalent for non-force classes that have a companion they take under their wing and train) should be shapeable to your alignment and viewpoint if you choose to, you are supposed to be their teacher and mentor, this should have actual storyline impact in allowing your advice and example to mold their beliefs. I think Jaesa is a great example of how this could be done, with how you can choose to have her as light or dark, and choices you make in conversation with her can impact things like her attitude towards killing and sex. Also...nothing to do with the basic point of this thread, but I wish you COULD redeem Lord Scourge...you can lose SO MUCH AFFECTION so fast with him if you make a lot of light side choices. Not to mention truly redeeming such a hardcore sith would be a pretty awesome feather to have in your knight's cap.
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