How about BW gets some writers for any future Trooper storylines who are vets

[Muert]

Garza is female? I have no idea how you humans can tell. I mean, all your ears look the same.

[MeanMartian]

It's not just the trooper quest that has bizarre lightside/darkside choices. When playing a Bounty Hunter, I scored 50 lightside points by poisoning rebellious slaves.

[Tareel]

Or how about the Lt Major in the BH storyline. That one really got me going.

[Cordarn]

I'm a vet, and I have to tell you, the choices and conversations you get during the Trooper storyline are pretty horrific from a military point of view.

 

Me "I have been sent by the Republic High Command. Your elite fighter squadron is needed to stem the Imperial advance"

 

Them "I don't want to. I'd rather sit behind these sandbags and shoot at escaped criminals"

 

Me "No, seriously, these are orders. You are ORDERED to return to the Republic and help them meet the Imperial onslaught"

 

Them "nah, I don't think so. If you want us to follow those orders you have to go around and do all this stupid crap on this planet"

 

Me (IRL) "FFS, can I just club this fool senseless and stow him in my cargo bay until I get him back to civilization"?

 

Me (In-game) "OK, since the fate of the Republic depends on you following these orders, I guess I'll do all this crap just to make you do that"

 

It's ridiculous...and the Light/Dark side choices seem to imply that showing any sort of discipline at all is Dark (sure, deserters, have these credits so you can take a shuttle home while your friends, who have ALSO been here 5 years, fight and die without you....+50 Light Side!)"

 

Basically, from the evidence of the writing for these story arcs, I have to assume nobody in the design/writing team at Bioware understands how military people think, much less why they HAVE to think that way. For most of the game that is of small consequence, but if you have one of your 8 available classes be "Professional Soldier", I think it would be nice if somebody on your team actually comprehends what that means.

 

Just saying...

I agree I had the choice to follow a dying commanding officer's orders and let him die 100 dark side points! Save him and disobey a direct order 100 light side points! Yeah really need some vets in their.

[DrNuncheon]

It's not just the trooper quest that has bizarre lightside/darkside choices. When playing a Bounty Hunter, I scored 50 lightside points by poisoning rebellious slaves.

 

That's a sidequest for all Empire side, not just BHs.

 

Also, the choice isn't between poisoning them or not, it's "kill them mercifully or make them suffer".

[Freeborne]

I don't think this is a good idea at all.

 

 

Making the Trooper storyline more realistic would mean

 

1. A lot of Hurry Up and Wait moments.

2. Very Limited Dialogue Choices.

3. 5 uniform options at best.

[Cavadus]

I agree with the OP. As a vet myself it's been tolerable at best and painful at worst to mull through our chapter storylines.

 

No one's asking for 100% hyper-accuracy; just some writing with an eye towards accurate details.

[Abimelech]

I don't think this is a good idea at all.

 

 

Making the Trooper storyline more realistic would mean

 

1. A lot of Hurry Up and Wait moments.

 

 

 

LOL How true!

[MeanMartian]

That's a sidequest for all Empire side, not just BHs.

 

Also, the choice isn't between poisoning them or not, it's "kill them mercifully or make them suffer".

 

Never said it was a bounty hunter quest, just a quest that I did while playing a bounty hunter.

 

And, at best, the choice should be between getting dark side points for killing them or getting more dark side points for killing them slowly, but as a rule, when you're using poison there probably shouldn't be a light side option.

 

The troopers, smugglers and slumming it Jedis can score 50 darkside points for finding medical supplies stolen from the Republic military and returning them to their rightful owners. This games light/dark duality is overly simplified to the point of being messed up.

Edited January 26, 2012 by MeanMartian

[va_wanderer]

As a retired Vet myself the only true *** moment for me was when General Garza Ordered you to kill the three civilians for MAYBE being cybernetically enhanced..First thing that came to my mind was (sarcasm here) I could always use the I was just following Orders Defense....

 

I guess the only other thing that Grinds my A** is calling a female Officer Sir...

 

It's more a generic call- since in the Republic military, some officers aren't even capable of being called male OR female, being from races that don't qualify for either. Ergo, a default "sir".

 

And later on there's

Getting the modified Rakghoul plague for Garza. Apparently, that makes me a Dark Sider

for WTFness, although considering it produces intelligent variations instead...

 

Other then that I play it like this I am the one in the blood the guts and the S**T so I am the one the makes the call not some 1...2...3...or 4 star some gazzilion light years away watching through a camera mounted on my shoulder that is Not seeing the full battlefield.

 

Playing Trooper "as a soldier" for me has meant not caring whether it's LS or DS. It's right or wrong, and if I have to stain my soul by Jedi standards, well, too frickin' bad. The right thing to do is good by me, and that includes following (most) orders. I actually felt guilty helping the deserters, but considering they'd been utterly clusterf'd by their commander (seriously), I did it- and then proceeded to confess I had when I got to the next station and took the chewing out.

 

The result is I'm mostly LS at 31, with 400 DS points. Feels OK, I'm a soldier, not a saint.

[el_pinko_grande]

Does the Republic military even make a distinction between enlisted and officers? I'm not very far in the Trooper storyline, so maybe this becomes clearer later, but it seems like it isn't that big a deal when you get promoted from sergeant to lieutenant. Not that I expect them to send my character to officer candidate school or something, but it seems like there should be more to it than just pinning some bars to your armor.

[va_wanderer]

Does the Republic military even make a distinction between enlisted and officers? I'm not very far in the Trooper storyline, so maybe this becomes clearer later, but it seems like it isn't that big a deal when you get promoted from sergeant to lieutenant. Not that I expect them to send my character to officer candidate school or something, but it seems like there should be more to it than just pinning some bars to your armor.

 

IIRC, there's actually a whole codex section on it you get when you're on Ord Mantell, as a lore object. One of the flags in the main quest hub.

[TheCosmicMuffet]

I agree I had the choice to follow a dying commanding officer's orders and let him die 100 dark side points! Save him and disobey a direct order 100 light side points! Yeah really need some vets in their.

 

I don't know, man. It's great when an officer offers himself up to die--beats getting the short straw, myself --but it's also keeping your priorities straight. I don't think they'd officially recommissioned him at that point. He's just some prisoner you've been ordered to retrieve. They say the person he orders you after is a high priority target, but so what. There's high priority targets all over the place. If everyone stopped to shoot at everything high priority, nobody would get 5 feet from their ship.

 

It's darkside to go chasing after some guy for revenge and letting your mission die on you, and it's lightside to stick to your mission even when you're tempted to want to do someone a favor, and, in the end, put a good guy back in the pilot's seat to fight for the right side.

 

It's a little contrived that the choices is he dies/you do what he asks or he lives/you ignore him, since it seems like those things shouldn't be related--either he's mortally wounded or he's going to pull through. The medicine they've got is supposed to be incredible.

 

This is why it doesn't pay to have a vet write it. Ask 10 guys and you get 10 different answers on what they're willing to put up with/find believable. Depends on service, duty, or just their bad/good experiences.

 

There are vets out there who think this story is true to life because they had a weird CO in a crappy post and no friends.

[foofad]

Calling women "sir" doesn't bother me in the slightest. The distinction just isn't meaningful enough to me, and I've read tons of scifi in which this was the norm.

 

My main beef is just the constant cheerleading. The dialog from my character is just so vapid, it seems like a huge waste of Hale's talents.

[Steltor]

I don't know, man. It's great when an officer offers himself up to die--beats getting the short straw, myself --but it's also keeping your priorities straight. I don't think they'd officially recommissioned him at that point. He's just some prisoner you've been ordered to retrieve. They say the person he orders you after is a high priority target, but so what. There's high priority targets all over the place. If everyone stopped to shoot at everything high priority, nobody would get 5 feet from their ship.

 

Not only that, but if you talk to some of his (former/future) subordinates, they basically say "Officer X [whatever his name is, I don't recall] IS the unit". So, operational efficiency of the remainder of the unit that you would be rescuing would apparently suffer a lot without their commanding officer.

 

Regardless, light side/dark side seems mostly about preserving life (or otherwise "doing good deeds") in the now as much as possible, and not so much about *potential* lives saved in the future. The Trooper quest line on Tatooine is a prime example.

[Loklamone]

I agree with OP i really dont understand the logic behind some of these quests. I dont know how many times i have defeated an imperial camp and questioned there leader where my choice was either to let him go because he has some how saw the error of his ways (light side choice), or kill him for slaughtering innocents and to keep him from doing further hard aka the greater good (dark side choice). seriously allow a 3rd option of arresting him to face trial for his crimes against humanity.

 

One that really made me mad was there was an imperial commander who ordered bombings of civilian towns for fun and tortured and murdered people. If i didnt want dark side points i had to let him go. So your telling me that during WW2 if they ever captured Hitler it we should have just let him go with a slap on the wrist as long as he promised he wouldnt commit genocide ever again? Really flawed logic if you ask me.

[EmperorTeknoman]

I disagree. I loved the story completely. Made me feel like I was the Star Wars version of Shepard (I know the Female voice actor is Fem Shep thanks). Had a very ME feel to me and I loved the writing.

 

I even plan on making a commando male alt just to see the Darkside options play out (also romancing Elara).

[Colder]

First off; Imperial Agent storyline is hands down less 'realistic' than trooper, because you're supposed to be a top agent and end up hunting terrorists on a very sloppy-working intelligence service and on top of that, half the galaxy knows you're a secret agent.

 

Second, this doesn't bother me one bit, because we're in Star Wars. Yeah, we have all these stuff that make so much sense such as:

 

- Blasters: What the heck kind of weapon is that? Supposedly laser, but less effective with far longer range and best of all; visible shots. Why would anyone utilize snipers whose every single shot has a huge "I'M HERE HUN!" poster on them? To top that off, easily visible sniper shots isn't something Bioware's implemented to balance pvp for Imperial Agents; it's in the lore (anyone recall the sniper rifle in Jedi Academy?)

 

- Space ships: They don't follow physics at all. But who cares, Star Wars is iconic for that as well as having sound in space (which later on got explained as ships having sensors that mimic sound for helping pilots get situational awareness), and Bioware actually even broke the lore a bit because in space missions your guns have unlimited range. That's not official lore, because Star Wars starship guns do have range. I don't mind though, unlimited range makes a kazillion times more sense since we're in space.

 

But apparently these (just to mention two, there's a looong list I have) don't bother you as much as everyone being called 'sir'. Since yes, they're called 'sir' due to, as someone already explained, this is customary in the Star Wars due to various species that can enlist in the military. Yeah, this means even Leia Organa gets called "sir" in the books. Go figure.

 

To sum it up, I don't think trooper story was written with realism in mind because we're in a universe that doesn't know what realism means. It's a militaristic hero story akin to WW II comics some of us read as kids.

 

As for LS / DS choices: People should keep in mind that those choices follow the Star Wars ideology of the Force. It's clearly stated (even numerous times) in the Jedi Code that when emotion clouds judgement, the decision made is of the Dark Side of the Force. So to that background, if you kill a mass murderer, you follow the Dark Side, since you give him vengeance for the deeds he's done, alleviate the fear that if he lives he'll repeat those deeds and show lack of trust in the justice system in place. Light Side choice is to spare him, as he should be brought to face charges and knowledge of his full deeds and reasons he had for them should be found. Whether he lives or dies is a choice that needs to be made by meditating upon the will of the Force. His death might not be justice when all the facts are brought to light, and this is why simply shooting him out of your fear and anger is a Dark Side choice. I don't know if this explanation made much sense to people, but I'm trying to get across that Light Side and Dark Side work on different ground than people's moral compass of simply what's good or evil, and I'm very glad Bioware has realized this when writing stories for the non-Force using classes as well. Since yes, there are times when the most effective military decision is Dark Side and there are times when it's Light Side, and thus you need to find compromise between strategy and balance in the Force.