What Keeps Eating My Time

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

I'm a pretty big Star Wars fan. Not the biggest. Hell, not even the biggest out of my close circle of friends. But by most people's standards, I'm a pretty big fan.

Know what else I'm a fan of? Bioware games. Roleplaying games. Star Wars Bioware Roleplaying Games. My kryptonite. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was a pretty singular experience for me, combining all of these disparate elements into one of the best games I had ever played.

Now, the count of excellent RPG's from Bioware is increased by one with Star Wars: the Old Republic, a bizarre fusion of singleplayer roleplaying and massively multiplayer online roleplaying. This weird little amalgamation of genres shouldn't work, but in some bizarre fashion it does.

I've tried MMO's before. Several. Ultimate Online? Cool, but meh. Evercraft? It was fun getting drunk and falling into the ocean halfway between continents, and to wash up on some strange new shore, but that was about it. Meh. I gave World of Warcraft a shot, but just kind of wandered the woods outside Stormwind while my friends raided dungeons and fought demigods. They got the bug, and they got it bad. Me? Apparently I had some sort of immunity. City of Heroes was close, and that was because of the milieu more than anything. Like I've said before, I love comics. So of course I loved crafting my own superhero story and playing it out day in and day out.

And then we have Star Wars Galaxies. Now, there was an MMO with potential. A game of paradoxes, SWG was simultaneously one of the best MMO's ever made, and one of the worst. It had so much going for it: level-free class system, player controlled economy, multiple enormous worlds that you could do anything you wanted to on, and a sense of wonder. I don't even know how many nights my friends and I were up until sunrise wandering from one horizon to the next, exploring every nook and cranny, floating from one vista to the next. Sure, we did the quests, did the grind whenever we were in the mood for it. But mostly we just wandered, and explored.

It's cheesy, I know, but that game had a bit of magic in it that I have yet to see since. The Morrowind games come close, maybe as close as a single

player game can come, but SWG... No other game have I ever enjoyed making a campfire and literally just sitting at it, watching the stars cartwheel overhead and wild beasts just skirt the halo of light before disappearing back into the night, just for the sake of enjoying it. We'd do this on most nights; set up camp in some undiscovered spit of land on Tattooine or Corellia, let our droids out to do tricks for us, and just talk (in character!) about what we'd seen that day, or what we had planned. What grand adventures we no doubt would be going on the next day, what our ultimate goals and dreams were. The level of immersion of that game was almost magical.

Then of course there was the lack of starships, the interesting but ultimately broken language system, then all of the bizarre things they'd ultimately do with the Jedi. It was fun while it lasted though.

The Old Republic, on the other hand, is a completely different experience. A little more sterile, a little more walled in and already set up for you. There's not quite so much magic that you bring to the game yourself. You don't have to wander around with friends, roleplaying on your own. That's already in the game. Every quest you take, every person/droid you kill. These things all have meaning and weight in the game. There's little grinding, because most everything is paced well enough that you don't need to. You go to an area, talk to a myriad of NPC's that all need your help with something or another, and complete these quests at roughly the same time, earning a certain amount of XP that is calculated to level you up in line with your own personal storyline that will take you to another area at the appropriate time.

This sounds rather bland and run of the mill, and if you look past some aspects of the game it absolutely is. But that’s only if you actually go and completely ignore the more obvious aspects of the game. The typical Bioware skill for telling a story is ever present, in every single fetch quest, every grind mission, every conversation with an NPC.

Much has been made of TOR’s fully voice acted quests, and for good reason. It takes what should be somewhat repetitive grinding and elevates it to something that you actually want to do. You need me find out what’s killing settlers? Sure, no problem! Somebody is stalking your wife? Hey, I’ll take care of it.

Then there is the Storyline that each character class has. The Storyline is a series of quests spanning the entirety of the game that apply only to your character class, and involve your character pursuing some far-reaching goal that is “unique” to you. I say “unique” because every character in that class is experiencing the same story for themselves, though their decisions and the way they go about it may change. This is fantastic, and because of this it’s the first MMO that I’ve actually made three characters in the first month of playing, and played each for at least a few days each. I want to know what each class is doing, what their own story is. And I want to make an original character that actually has a personality, has something that actually is unique to them.

I want to create a story,  and thanks to the online component, I can involve others in that story.

I don’t know what this article is. Is it a review? An exercise in compare and contrast? Or just simple, good old-fashioned rambling? A little of each, I think (though probably a little more of the latter than anything else), but mostly it’s just my thoughts and experiences with MMO’s, RPG’s, and Star Wars in general. I have a love/hate relationship with the brand, but despite all the grief I give Lucas and his lackeys, I can’t stop going back to that time that is so long, long ago, and that place so far, far away.

Damn you George Lucas.

2012: January in Review the Final Chapter

And we arrive at the end, wherein I dig into what amounted to a rather eclectic portion of the month. We've got instructional, post-apocalypse sci-fi, pulp noir, post-apocalyptic young adult, and Star Wars. Let's get to it, shall we?

Writing a Novel with Scrivener by David Hewson

Writing a Novel with Scrivener was a Kindle exclusive that was offered in the Lending Library, which is a program Amazon offers to Prime customers that essentially lets them read a book for free a month. I am a pretty die hard Scrivener user, and have been for about four or five years now. I'd go into that further, but that seems to be the kind of thing I should save for later.

This little book is essentially one author's user case for the software. He details how he uses it in his own fiction writing, and what he thinks are the best ways to get the most out of it when writing a novel. And that really is all there is to it. It's well written, informative, and is pretty helpful with a lot of things that even after using the software for so long I didn't really know. Scrivener is like that, there's always something useful if you dig just a little bit deeper.

Hewson did a good job of writing something informative, but keeping it brief and interesting.

Rating: 7/10

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson

I really like Star Wars. That's no secret, ask anyone. But I'm not really a huge reader of the Expanded Universe books. Back before the prequels, when old man Lucas refused to acknowledge them one way or another, it was mostly just the "Doomsday weapon of the week" kind of deal, where Luke and the gang had to run around the galaxy destroying one planet destroying gun or bomb or starfighter after another. Then the Prequels happened, and it was all about the Jedi, and how awesome they are with the help of their clone soldiers. Super fun!

I hate most of that. So you may be able to see why I enjoyed the Republic Commandobooks so much. Written by Karen Traviss, a former war reporter who readily admits to not being a Star Wars fan in the first place. In fact, after being offered the job to write some tie-in novels she said she did a lot of research and found the Jedi to be a lot of jerks for the most part.

I'm taking a long time to explain why I love this series, but bear with me. Her task was to write a series of novels following a group of the Clone Commandos that are created in Episode II, Attack of the Clones. So she takes that concept and runs with it. The Clones are trained/raised by a badass Mandalorian (think Boba Fett, or, sigh, his father Jango) who treats them like his own sons and makes them realize that they're a literal slave army, created for the sole purpose of fighting and dying for the Republic with no choice in the matter.

When the war breaks out in the movie/books, the Jedi are all made officers (and Generals for the most part), not because they're trained to be such, but because they can do magic! And not only are they cool with these slave soldiers, most don't even acknowledge there being a problem. So the Jedi are dicks, essentially.

And I've gone on a long time without even talking about this book. Okay, back on track. This is the fifth book in the series (or the first in a second series if you want to get technical), and features the same characters that we have followed for the previous four. It takes place at the dawn of the Empire, with several of the main characters having been forced to join the Imperial 501st regiment, or the Vader's Fist, tasked with hunting down and killing the remaining Jedi.

Unfortunately, the book is better conceptually than in actual practice. There is little in a whole story arc, rather it feels like the first part in a much larger arc. It almost feels like she had a whole large story plotted out, then as she wrote it her editor told her to stop at a certain page, and to save the rest for the next book. Which would be fine, except for Old Man Lucas has decided that the books are now non-canonical, effectively ending the series.

I could go on, trust me, on how much Lucas has screwed up Star Wars over the years, but I'll quit after going on at length already. Traviss is the best of the EU writers, and it's too bad that the last of her books in this pretty great series is going to be the worst of them all.

Rating: 7/10