There's one other tiny detail to mention from Fallen Empire and onward. And I think this isn't limited to this game but the whole MMO genre. It's like not only is it players can not fail...it's like they're NOT ALLOWED to fail. Suicide Mission of Mass Effect 2 had stakes and consequences...but in the MMO, there are no consequences, no stakes, no real meaty motivation to grind your butt off unless you just like having the biggest numbers and all the purple or orange gear. As for "who drives the story", the answer is obvious (but only in a meta context): you the player. And that facade decisively melts away when you bring in the fact that there are hundreds or thousands of other players just like you (and probably better than you, too). Like I've said, I believe this is a more "universal MMO genre" issue, and not a "personal" matter for this specific game or its development team. I've been to SWG, SWGEmu, DCU, Firefall, and even sampled WoW so I believe there are such themes in terms of the story being built around the player, and everything else revolves around the player. It'd be like a God, except the nature of video games is far too rigid for you to FEEL like a God (for that, get some actual friends and physical pen-and-paper for we need to turn to the old-school tabletop role-playing game). No, the TRUE Gods are the devs. They CREATE the world that we bask in and explore. We're the ones who play in the computer's rules spanning gigabytes, but it's them who have the wizardry to define those rules.

Yeah, and it sucks because it's a massive disappointment given how much more could've been done with the idea (like Suicide Mission of Mass Effect 2, which is where Bioware peaked).

Appreciate all the discussion, and it's a lot to digest, particularly since PvP is still painful. Thanks all the same. Also, while all the details and tips are lovely, it's hard to account for much of any of that since my brain at the time was in a frantic "panic mode" of sorts, basically "throw everything and the kitchen sink at it" or a similar proverb, dealing with the painful "mosh pit" that is the PvP experience in general. Thus I believe illustrates the difference between "noob" and "pro". Far as my build goes, I wanted to get close to "full tank", so that any of the enemies would be doing "plush doll" damage to me (which is to say, 0 or close enough). I've seen it in some games where my enemies were seemingly invincible and barely even slowed...I want to be on the giving end of that, not the receiving end. Plus, "random/solo queue" means I can't really get to choose my team composition going in, much less have reliable partner(s) by my side (quite unthinkable given specific contexts both in-character and out).

Veteran Difficulty is throwing a couple curveballs, and the Rancor fight was a real clutch win. But with the light version that has Arcann join your side, you have to deal with an invincible Captain and numerous minions, which under normal circumstances wouldn't be all that scary. But on Veteran mode, they can wipe me out in seconds (with 336 gear rating and the 2 legendary implants for full tank build). Arcann himself moves slower than a college student who just got out of bed (including his scenario specific abilities), and worst of all, I can't find a guide on this one particular boss fight. Everyone's happy to talk about the exploration section of the party, but nobody wants to talk about how to complete this massive difficulty spike. I *WINCE* to imagine what it'd be like on Master mode, particularly presuming you can't bring any other players along for the ride. Yeah, players are irritating for their shorthand and always running around, but if it makes the job doable, that's just a pill I have to swallow.

I was testing just how much of a difference can be made between 2 characters: 1 of them focused on dark side with zero base prep (those specialists), and the other light side focused with maximum base prep. So far, all the difference I've seen is just flavor text around the base and a few more NPC bodies standing around idly by. Though I haven't quite gotten to the Torian or Vette segment, but still, most of it feels like the whole building a base and building an army bits are 110% worthless in both gameplay and narrative.

My time with PvP is, in a word, painful. Everyone I meet has top-tier gear, just all around, and anytime I try to attack, it feels like I might as well be waving a plush toy at the other players, and 3 of them can wipe me out in only seconds. I even made a video to show what it's like: https://youtu.be/qOC2zxZWNa8 So I will agree the PvP is "straight up unplayable" but maybe for different specific reasons.

I'll be honest, that would be a very creative way to "add insult to injury". >:D My Chad would be like, "I stole your throne, I stole some of your power, and now I'm going to steal your wife."

With playing a dark path through the whole Fallen Empire expansion, I found there are gay options for my male character to romance both Koth (the goofy pilot) and Theron (the former SIS agent), so why is there no option for Senya the MILF? I get that she's probably well past menopause, but still, I like her, and I'm sure the sufficiently advanced technology of a science fantasy universe can find ways around menopause. She's both a badass and a good mom, which sounds close to "my type" out-of-character. And in this fictional universe where any player character can handle the complications of children and financial dependents (particularly in the Fallen Empire story which basically revolves around us doing that regardless), I don't see why not.

Don't get me started.

This is among the current iteration of the game (as of the original writing of this), and went through the bonus content to Everything worked fine the first time with a different character. Second character, and HK-55 is now invisible completely. I tried leaving the area, I tried logging out (both to character selection menu and closing the game entirely), but none of them solved the issue. I'm worried about abandoning the mission if that would mean I won't be able to restart "Arma Rasa" and thus I'd be in a different type of stuck. So, for now, I sent a bug report through the in-game interface pointing to this post, and I'll go to bed while I wait for a response. Screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X6EolC-CaKnoHFyvlmBgBoJYKn4j7crm/view?usp=sharing As a secondary matter, with the special bonus chapter included, using his ability that sends him forward towards the enemy sometimes makes him phase through walls like they aren't even there, and ends up putting him out of bounds of the map. It's nothing that /stuck can't fix, but still, it gets real annoying after falling through the map for the third or so time.

Traditional economics were not designed with the unemployables in mind, and to tie it back to here, that's going to make it harder for people of any level to actually contribute on games such as SWTOR. We're already seeing "senior or bust" to the point where anyone with less than years of work experience (college degrees and/or certifications don't count) might as well not bother doing anything other than creating stuff for fun, so when not even "senior" is good enough for the competition's unbeatable price of $0 we're going to need to redefine modern living.

I can +1 that, particularly the lighthearted Smuggler storyline and the male Smuggler's voice actor. I honestly enjoyed that one a lot more than I thought I would. And "The Jackal" is among the only antagonists in general (doubly in SWTOR) that I honestly "love to hate" (which means whoever wrote it totally nailed it).

To be fair, there are other corporations - both profit and non-profit - which have a heavy-handed approach to censorship, so I don't blame 'em for worrying about that coming to pass. Also, 1) the "Legacy" thing is more a "new game plus" so that there's some in-character reason (no matter how flimsy) to justify those little +10 presence perks you get from companions that carry over across your whole account. The whole system of the Alliance is cool at least on paper, I just wish some of them weren't so painful (Dr. Rakghoul needs you to, I kid you not, wait for a very specific and very time-sensitive event to transpire even after grinding medical supplies for him, and Lizard Hunter wants you to search for ghosts of spawns or pray you get a huge group to take on World Bosses...oh and the big Recruiter veteran of Havoc Squad is still competing for the most painful of all: PvP). Where was I? Oh yeah, right, the whole lot of meh. Pre-Alliance, what I liked most was keeping the clean-cut Republic vs Empire, but what I don't like is falling into the same tired cliches of every MMO ever. There's a whole cartoon focused on WoW that illustrates what I'm talking about, and the points are as valid here as they are there. And 2) I'm shocked that the "EA is evil" narrative is either false or open to debate. I have no data to add, just simple surprise. But it makes sense, they're the ones investing in games like that (that's what producers and publishers do), so it's fair for them to keep a leash on deciding how these teams utilize finite resources (I must stress the word FINITE here). For if there's nobody to hold the leash, we end up with Star Citizen (for both good and bad). 3) The tiny fee/tax on quick travel only hurts the poor people and new players. All of us "Legendary" people just snicker at the 4 digit price tag while we bathe in our 7 digit credit balances (many even having 10 digits). I get what they're going for: drain the inflation. But there's got to be a better way than making noobs suffer. (Because Galactic Seasons is very capable of that on paper, but I do not have the insider data to state whether or not it is actually successful with that goal.) 4) I haven't gotten to "Galactic Command" stuff yet, but it sounds like the way the guides describe the Alliance in general. On paper, you're building your forces in preparation to fight the Eternal Empire (very cool, reminds me of taking on some Reapers with uniting the whole galaxy and how juicy that could be if executed correctly), then the guides are basically like "Naw, all you get are loot boxes with some cosmetic clothes and companion gifts, plus a bit of flavor text and more bodies in your base." So, the payoff is only surface deep? Remember, Mass Effect 2 was the peak design, the final "Suicide Mission" was all about the game judging you on how thoroughly and correctly you accomplished the whole game. Juxtapose that with here, and... 5) AI is going to bring the "End of All Jobs", and there's just nothing we are willing to do to stop it. For all the decrying, progress will march on at its mathematically predictable pace unless something seriously biblical happens. A certain virus, for example, has attempted such upheaval with taking over the world and ruling all civilizations (yet I must emphasize the word ATTEMPTED). What would happen if such an "attempt" were completely successful through-and-through?

Can confirm! I was just having a discussion about it a couple days ago, forget the details but it eventually trailed to what the placeholder / default images would be. Now we know what that looks like in this game: weird blue bushes. Freaked me out first time I saw it.

I still sense some attempts at returning to tradition, and like the critics of this thread are pointing out, there is likely fair reason for this. Whether or not the corporations actually succeed, it's fair to have differing opinions. All I'll say is, yeah, I liked what they were going for with the whole of the Original Mass Effect Trilogy. Specifically, there was this idea of a looming threat inbound, and you spend all of the first 2 games specifically preparing for it, and the last one fighting it. And in both 2 and 3, there's a lot of focus on building up your forces and alliances to prepare for the climactic showdown (which is why "Suicide Mission" is so memorable: to see all your dominoes fall into a perfectly aligned chain - contrast with the end of Mass Effect 3, where there was a deliberate, uh, "subversion" to all the hard-won prep-work). I was *HOPING* that the Alliance stuff here would take a similar queue, but the guides I read indicate it is superficial at most, which is anywhere from a disappointment to a missed opportunity, depending on the intentions behind-the-scenes. P.S. Guilds suck, because I hate rules (admittedly that's a more universal and inescapable problem with "IRL" taking more queues from the Empire than the Republic - except on the surface) and I want to enjoy the feeling of just doing my own thing. Also, guild ads are some of the most jarring messages when I want to be 110% "in-character" at all times so long as I am logged on, second only to the nonsense of General Chat. You can say I take the "roleplay" in "roleplaying game" comparatively seriously. No matter how you slice it, I want to enjoy being a free spirit, and I don't care if anyone else is along for the ride or not. Just to make a point, I made my own, single-player guild based around the family tree of my characters and the in-game "Legacy" system.