So many doomsday devices.

[Ukon]

Is it just me, or is the "World Destroyer" trope getting a little old? In the Jedi Knight storyline alone, it seems I've run into a dozen or more galaxy-killing monstrosities, machines, species and ancient evils. And then I use my lightsaber on it until it's gone. I feel no sense of urgency to stop the next Apocalypse-causing critter because I know that after I put this one down the next one will pop up.

 

By level 45, I've saved the galaxy so many times over, it has ceased to be impressive. Now it's just another notch on my belt. "Oh look, another ten million year old evil creature. Guess I'll kill you next."

[Darth_Wicked]

I wouldn't exactly say that doomsday devices and World killers are one and the same, especially when there's a whole Galaxy to contend with. Also, there's no such plot device on Act 2 and I wouldn't call the Death Mark or the Planet Prison World killers.

 

Plus, there are two(!!!) Death Stars alone in the original SW films, so it's not exactly something that came out of the blue uninvited, especially when the JK storylines tried to emulate the classical SW approach, when it comes to the lone Knight saving the Galaxy.

 

If you were not up to that, then surely you went for the wrong class IMO.

Edited October 23, 2013 by Darth_Wicked

[Axe_Faktor]

By level 45, I've saved the galaxy so many times over, it has ceased to be impressive. Now it's just another notch on my belt. "Oh look, another ten million year old evil creature. Guess I'll kill you next."

 

I mean, isn't that how you should feel though? The Jedi Knight is the ultimate hero, saving the galaxy is all in a day's work. If you wanted a campaign with a bit more intrigue and intelligence, shoulda checked out the Agent.

[Ukon]

The Planet Prison burns worlds, killing everything on it. The Emperor's Ritual. Belsavis has the World Razer. Voss has the Evok-Nusk AND Sel Makor. There are other examples that I can't list off hand. And I'm not just talking about the class story, but also the planet stories.

 

Why can't we just get a nice galaxy-spanning food factory? Or an ancient good thing? It's like there's a monster under every rock.

[Darth_Wicked]

The Planet Prison burns worlds, killing everything on it. The Emperor's Ritual. Belsavis has the World Razer. Voss has the Evok-Nusk AND Sel Makor. There are other examples that I can't list off hand. And I'm not just talking about the class story, but also the planet stories.

 

Why can't we just get a nice galaxy-spanning food factory? Or an ancient good thing? It's like there's a monster under every rock.

 

You are mistaken and your post is full of inaccuracies.

 

The Planet Prison was developed by Doctor Godera and it's not meant to destroy the World that is meant to protect. The one weapon you are referring to is the one on Balmorra, which is the Barrager. As far as I'm aware, Doctor Godera had NO involvement whatsoever in it.

 

The Evok-Nusk is NOT a World Killer but rather an ancient Sith starship who crashed on Voss, thousands of years ago. Sel-Makor is a blight on Voss and one that wishes to consume all sentient life on the Planet and take hold of it but I wouldn't call it a doomsday device.

 

The World Razor is part of the World arc for Belsavis and it's NOT a JK exclusive kind of thing, while the Emperor's ritual is exactly that: A ritual, not a device.

 

Either way, I'll say what I said before: I'm fairly sure you picked the wrong class storyline, since it was obvious from the very beginning that the JK was meant to be the lone Hero who saves the Galaxy in the end.

[Azurestone]

Edited Edited February 12, 2014 by Azurestone

[Darth_Wicked]

Join the dark side and destroy the galaxy.

 

I missed that storyline. Which one is it? Do tell.

[Euphrosyne]

Maybe the notion that each of these devices is a "doomsday" device is incorrect. The sentiment is still valid.

 

SWTOR's writing does suffer badly from an overabundance of superweapons that have powers and capabilities out of any proportion to even remotely realistic technology - and which can be broken by flipping a switch or by a well-placed lightsaber thrust. These technological terrors are easy to explain, easy to defeat, but ridiculous to conceptualize - not that most people bother with that in any sort of game, much less an MMO.

 

What's more, the writers are apparently aware of this embarrassingly comic-book tendency. One of the most encouraging lines of dialogue in the entire game can be chosen by an Imperial player at the beginning of the Makeb line, when Darth Marr tries to explain how important isotope 5 is. The player has the option to note that technology by itself is rarely, if ever, a war-winner. Marr acknowledges this complaint as valid, but claims that it still has value, and that without the technology, the Empire is certain to fall victim to rapid and total destruction.

 

Unfortunately, that happily realistic exchange was blown out of the water by the end of the Imperial questline on Makeb, which gave the impression that Marr and his Imps fully expected their shiny new isotope 5 weapons, by themselves, to totally reverse all of the Republic's colossal advantages and allow the Empire to resume the offensive. So even after bringing up what a farce the search for Wunderwaffen was, the writers chose to play the stupid trope straight in the end. Fantastic.

Edited October 23, 2013 by Euphrosyne

[CrazyMcGee]

I think that's the spirit of Star Wars though, and the spirit of any role-playing games too.

 

What's the alternative? "Quick, Master Jedi, if you don't stop them, we'll all be mildly inconvenienced!" You kind of need some high stakes, otherwise why would you need a Jedi? Local mercenaries could sort it out if it was something minor. All these worlds have some kind of local force who could handle minor problems (despite the minor quests you're sometimes asked to do!). So if it was something small, you could just have e.g. the Voss or CorSec or Republic soldiers handle it themselves. It would be a bit pointless to ask you to help out.

[Euphrosyne]

There are plenty of instances in this game, in Star Wars, and in fiction generally, where there's plenty of tension created by a problem that isn't solved by pushing a button or unplugging the power cord - and yet still remains enough of a problem to need to call in the big guns. Take, for instance, the entire Battle of Corellia - on both sides. Or the plot of The Empire Strikes Back. Or the X-Wing books.

 

It's kind of a joke to say that without superweapons, the plot wouldn't have enough legs to justify the participation of the Big Damn Heroes. This is a game that shoves skillions of trivial quests in the player's face from the starter planets all the way to Oricon. Get food for a starving baby. Find out where a mentally ill cameraman ran off too. Steal some eels from a smuggler. Use a scanner on some suspicious-looking people. If we can justify our collective participation in that kind of mindless busywork, it oughtn't be very difficult to justify our collective participation in important battles and raids without using the crutch of ridiculous technology to keep the story from falling down.

[AlexDougherty]

I missed that storyline. Which one is it? Do tell.

 

It's a level 57 quest for the Sith warrior, although I believe the Sith Inquisitor can do it at level 59.

 

Lol.

[Darth_Wicked]

It's a level 57 quest for the Sith warrior, although I believe the Sith Inquisitor can do it at level 59.

 

Lol.

 

First time I hear of it. Is it in the PTS?

 

Ok. I'll stop now.

 

[Karkais]

Join the dark side and destroy the galaxy.

 

hi, Im Sith inquisitor and I have this awesome superweapon for destroying fleets, but I seem to have misplaced it..

[LordGarmaZabi]

The era this game starts in is called The Cold War. It's not hard to see what they did their xp

[Darth_Wicked]

hi, Im Sith inquisitor and I have this awesome superweapon for destroying fleets, but I seem to have misplaced it..

 

I've been wondering for MONTHS on end where I've put it but I can't remember either... Maybe Moff Pyron parked in the handicapped area and got towed?

[dazednconfuzed]

I missed that storyline. Which one is it? Do tell.

 

The advanced class 'Emperor'.

 

I agree with the OP. Not all of them are world killers, but there are loads of superweapons out there. The worst part of it is, the majority of them seem to have been in development by the Republic. Why does the 'good' faction in the game seem to be the one developing all these superweapons (and then losing control of them)?

 

I mean, even look at the FPs... Hammer Station is a Republic supwerweapon that they lost.

[jedimasterjac]

Are you serious? We, as humans, are constantly looking for better ways to destroy one another. Hell, we already have the capability to destroy our own planet. Do you expect an entire galaxy not to find better, more capable ways of warfare, murder, and mayhem?

[jedimasterjac]

The advanced class 'Emperor'.

 

I agree with the OP. Not all of them are world killers, but there are loads of superweapons out there. The worst part of it is, the majority of them seem to have been in development by the Republic. Why does the 'good' faction in the game seem to be the one developing all these superweapons (and then losing control of them)?

 

I mean, even look at the FPs... Hammer Station is a Republic supwerweapon that they lost.

 

Look at the U.S. The "good" guys. We developed the nuclear bomb (with assistance from foreign countries, of course.)

 

And, yes, I do know saying the U.S. is "good" is quite subjective, but still.

[NyxNoxNothing]

Are you serious? We, as humans, are constantly looking for better ways to destroy one another. Hell, we already have the capability to destroy our own planet. Do you expect an entire galaxy not to find better, more capable ways of warfare, murder, and mayhem?

 

With hundreds of millions of stars* in even the smaller galaxies and presumably at least a few tens of millions inhabited worlds i would expect there to be at least a couple million system devastating superweapons floating around mostly unattended at any one time. Of course with the sheer number of systems in a galaxy the odds of any given system being targeted by a superweapon are pretty low. The odds get even lower when you consider that most superweapons only have the capability to attack individual worlds. So in even the most peaceful galactic empire there are probably dozens of planet devastating superweapon attacks occurring every day with no real noticeable effect on the overall galaxy.

 

...

 

The scale of a galaxy does raise an interesting issue... i don't think any of the galactic empires have lasted long enough for the Emperor to go on a tour of all the star systems a galactic empire would hold, much less every planet. Even at stopping in each system for about ten minutes it would probably take a few millenia to tour them all, and no empire has lasted nearly that long. The sheer logistics of ruling millions of star systems with trillions of inhabitants in each system would probably make it impossible for the Emperor to oversee anything but the most general of policy decisions. There would most likely be thousands of star systems needing critical policy decisions every hour of every day. An Emperor of a galactic empire would probably never have the time to consider any individual planet in his decisions. Presumably there would be a few thousand ministers each overseeing several thousand regents each of whom would be in charge of directing several hundred star systems.

 

Honestly a galactic empire seems a bit much for any single emperor to handle.

 

*Our own Milky Way Galaxy has somewhere between 100-400 billion stars, so to make Lucas' galactic empire more manageable i'm presuming it's a relatively tiny dwarf galaxy no more than 10% the size of our galaxy.

Edited October 30, 2013 by NyxNoxNothing

[Euphrosyne]

Are you serious? We, as humans, are constantly looking for better ways to destroy one another. Hell, we already have the capability to destroy our own planet. Do you expect an entire galaxy not to find better, more capable ways of warfare, murder, and mayhem?

We, as humans, generally don't build superweapons. Atomic weapons are as close as we get. There's nothing even remotely like the Nova Colossus, Galaxy Destructor, or Nostril of Palpatine in human history.

[AlexDougherty]

We, as humans, generally don't build superweapons. Atomic weapons are as close as we get. There's nothing even remotely like the Nova Colossus, Galaxy Destructor, or Nostril of Palpatine in human history.

 

I have to disagree, the Nuclear Bomb was were we stopped (for the moment anyhow), but human history is awash with attempts to create superweapons from Greek Fire and Trebuchets to Heavy Canons, Bombs and Missiles.

[slafko]

Hell, we already have the capability to destroy our own planet.

 

Thanks for the LOLZ and please excuse me while I go and ROFLMAO.

[Euphrosyne]

I have to disagree, the Nuclear Bomb was were we stopped (for the moment anyhow), but human history is awash with attempts to create superweapons from Greek Fire and Trebuchets to Heavy Canons, Bombs and Missiles.

I don't believe that those things qualify as "superweapons" under any reasonable definition of "superweapon". But that's sidestepping the issue. Even if you define any new military technology as a "superweapon" - which is apparently what you're doing - it doesn't mean that you can compare things like high explosives, torsion catapults, or carriage-mounted plunging-fire large-caliber artillery to devices like the Shock Drum, the Firestorm lasers, the Eradicator probes, the Silencer, etc. You do see the difference between making a device that can kill people (with no apparent means of actually doing so) regardless of protection and location simply by putting a mark on them and pushing a button, and making a device that uses basic principles of physics to throw a big rock...right?

 

My first post criticized the game's writing for employing "technology" that had effects out of any proportion to "remotely realistic technology". (There were other elements to the definition, but that was the most salient one.) I understand that this is an IP in which we have, to put it crudely, laser swords and laser guns, space dreadnoughts, space magic, and so on. The definition of "remotely realistic technology" changes when you apply it to Star Wars. But it doesn't change that much.

 

At least in the movies, the only real superweapons were the Death Stars, outrageously expensive propositions that strained the economy of the entire galaxy to build. Yet in the EU (albeit mostly in the bad parts of the EU), superweapons with capabilities not that far removed from the Death Star itself proliferated to a ridiculous degree. (Mind you, this wasn't proliferation in the sense of mass production, but proliferation in the sense of there being a lot of different kinds of superweapons. There was only ever one Eye of Palpatine, but there was also one Sun Crusher, one Death Star prototype, one Galaxy Gun, two Eclipses...) Where did the money for these projects come from? Whither the resources and productive capacity? In SWTOR, three and a half thousand years before that, the number of superweapons - again, with capabilities not far removed from the Death Star - is mind-boggling. Furthermore, there are superweapons whose capabilities make no sense whatsoever, like the aforementioned Death Mark. The idea of producing a really big laser that can crack a planet open isn't that unreasonable, but the Death Mark has no means of delivery, no means of operation, and no countermeasure. Simply "put a mark" on somebody - whatever the hell that means - charge it up, push a button, and that person dies. What the hell.

 

The mark of most good weapons is not just their quality, but their quantity. If the US produced one or two Abrams tanks, they'd be useless, almost regardless of how powerful they were compared to every other country's tanks. Militaries don't like to put all their eggs in one basket. The knock on Nazi Germany's Wunderwaffen was less that they were useless (although a lot of them were) and more that there simply weren't enough of them to make a difference in anything. Germany is ridiculed for designing tanks like the Tiger that, while very much technologically superior to contemporary Soviet, American, and British armor, were so costly to produce that there were only a few thousand of them total, while the Allies massed tens of thousands of tanks at any one given time, let alone over the course of the entire war. Superweapons carry this tendency beyond ridicule into insanity, because while the capabilities of the weapons might be exponentially greater, there are also, invariably, exponentially fewer of them. In the real world, if superweapons were any good, militaries would snap them up and mass-produce them like they did with battleships, bombers, artillery, and so on. But they don't do that.

 

Superweapons in fictional plots only work to create a seemingly imposing opponent that can, however, be defeated in a relatively simple way. They raise the stakes to the level of a decisive battle, while simultaneously reducing the scale such that you don't need an army to solve the problem. You just need a plucky heroine and, possibly, her band of merry misfit companions. Or a lone suave hard-drinking womanizing spy. Or a single fighter pilot with a hefty helping of luck. You get the idea. It's profoundly lazy storytelling that has been elevated to the level of genre.

Edited October 30, 2013 by Euphrosyne

[AlexDougherty]

I don't believe that those things qualify as "superweapons" under any reasonable definition of "superweapon". But that's sidestepping the issue. Even if you define any new military technology as a "superweapon" - which is apparently what you're doing - it doesn't mean that you can compare things like high explosives, torsion catapults, or carriage-mounted plunging-fire large-caliber artillery to devices like the Shock Drum, the Firestorm lasers, the Eradicator probes, the Silencer, etc. You do see the difference between making a device that can kill people (with no apparent means of actually doing so) regardless of protection and location simply by putting a mark on them and pushing a button, and making a device that uses basic principles of physics to throw a big rock...right?.

 

The reason I used those example was relevant, at some point in history they were the highest pinnacle of weapons technology, and were responsible for mass deaths.

 

Greek fire and napalm were essentially used to destroy all life within an area, by burning it to death, they could not be easily extinguished.

Trebuchets were used to dismantle castles, they destroyed the most effective defences avaiable, as well as the forces defending said castle.

Heavy Cannons were used to wipe out entire cities, as well as any weapon emplacements.

Large Bombs used en masse were used not only to destroy cities, factories, harbours and dams, but used to terrify entire countries.

Missiles even before nuclear warheads had the same properties as I've shown for bombs, only they are self propelled.

 

These weapons were not only used to kill in huge numbers, but were used as warnings, attack us and we will use these to exterminate you, which is part of the point about Superweapons.

 

The Deathstar and all the subsequent superweapons were not that much more effective than a fleet of star destroyers, an orbital bombardment from such a fleet could easily wipe out all life on a planet, and very few planets had any defence against such a bombardment (I recall only one).

 

And the underlining point was that we are constantly developing new ways to kill more effectively, from unmanned aerial drones, to faster, harder hitting, more accurate machine guns, to biological warfare (and possibly nano warfare).