In SWTOR as a smuggler you start off losing your ship to another smuggler… and that’s the start of the “Chapter 1″ of your class quests.. all of the class quests from here on in are a single “story-arc” aimed at getting your ship back. It sounds cool, but really it’s quite a bit of highly directed deliver this, kill that style of questing. Mostly you don’t really know what you are going to do next until someone tells you to do it.

In FF you don’t really have a class quest at the low level, you all go through the same main storylines… different stories per starting area (there are 3). This could be rubbish, but actually while you are doing these small quests there are cutscenes, Unusally, in several of these you, as a character as well as a player, are just the observer. These cutscenes are story telling, you’re just in the right place at the right time to overhear conversations you probably shouldn’t have, their purpose is to progress the story-arc. Introduce the  lore as it were. Making you-the-character and you-the-player both experience the same event as an observer provides an interesting dimension. Anyway, by discovering that there are significant things going on that started before you arrived on the scene, and that have been going on while you’ve been tootling around killing rats all helps to give the story a sense of anticipation.

I’ve not explained well, I’ll try again –  in SWTOR you are the main character, the world pretty much revolves about you. In FF XIV you are the adventurer caught up in events that are much larger than you.

You pays your money and you takes your choice.

P.S don’t get me wrong – there’s still a lot of FF XIV that sucks.

For FFXIV you pay a base subscription of about £4/month… that gets you nothing as far as I can tell.

Then extra characters cost about £2.10. So the minimum fee is really about 6 pounds a month.

I have a thaumaturge and an archer. Both on Ragnarok and both with the same surname Equiphile.

Heres a screenie of my Archer taken from a cutscene, so the image quality is a fair bit better than when I’m actually playing.

And then I stopped playing. Cancelled my subscription and everything.

That was a surprise, even to me, but then I went and subscribed to Final Fantasy XIV. Yup, that old game that isn’t actually very good!

I think my main reason for going back to FF XIV is twofold; I really didn’t get on with the lack of humour in SWTOR while FFXIV has a decent amount of this seasoning. There’s something about the graphics in FFXIV that does it for me.

The UI, despite the recent patches, still smells, and it is still a grindy game. But it’s much less of a shock after coming from SWTOR than it was after coming from WOW.

Anyway, there you are.. I’m now playing a different MMORPG again.

Most of the quests were some levels above me and required judicious use of crowd control and the Stealth Generator Overload spell, I’m not sure of it’s real name, but basically it takes you out of combat – much like WoW Hunter’s Feign Death. Basically I was taking the fights in 2 phases.. the first was to CC the main elite and then whittle away at the “support” mobs that have low health and do too much damage. Then disengage and switch to full on healer mode for the main boss where I concentrate entirely on keeping Corso Riggs (tank) alive and let him slowly, oh so slowly, beat the boss down.

Unfortunately the last fight is a one-on-one with a level 33… 4 levels above me. Too rich for my liking, so I’ve gone back to grind a few levels before I try again.

While I’ve been tootling around I’ve seen a number of “interesting” comments in General Chat, to do with other players “having to “re-roll” new characters on the Red Eclipse because their previous server was too low population to be worth playing on.

This resonated with me because, basically, that’s exactly what I’ve done.. left my Munqui character on “Hidden Beks” and come back here.

General Chat is also quite full of adverts for guilds… this is mildly interesting because when I see one I usually go to /who and do a hunt for members of the advertised guild, 95% of the time there’s no more than 5 members of the guild online..

Odd that the reason I stopped playing on Red – population – is, in the end, the reason I’ve gone back to it.

Anyway i’m now back to playing a smuggler, when I left she was about level 19 and not finding it easy. I tried respeccing as DPS but didn’t seem to find it any easier. So it was back to healer after spending a level pew-pew-ing.

I don’t know what has changed, but it seems a bit easier, nothing like as easy as levelling a consular, but doable.

One thing that did give me some difficulty was getting money for speeder bike training. As a smuggler healer I tend to avoid fights, sneaking everywhere, an unexpected consequence is that I don’t pick up a lot of loot…and don’t make a lot of money that way. I ended up having to spend time on the “galactic market” selling earpieces. Fortunately I was really lucky, and there was just about nobody selling in the level range I could make, and, because this is a well populated server, there were actually some customers. Also working in my favour – there aren’t many earpiece drops.

That out of the way…

Playing a smuggler at least gives you some fun responses, unlike Blizzard, Bioware don’t seem to think we need much humour in SWTOR. And that made levelling my humourless consular a bit less fun than I’d like. Even his “wiseass” responses came across as more dickish than smart. Smugglers on the other hand do at least really know how to be smartasses and have even been known to crack a joke or two!

Consulars are just so far up themselves they never see the light of day – In my very humble opinion.

Was it fun? Yes.. I quite enjoyed the stress of no-one but the healer (aka me) crowd controlling, apparent lack of tank. I can’t be sure, but certainly no-one was specifically tanking, and there was no “focus-fire”. I actually thought we were going to wipe a couple of times! Partly due to the other players moving on leaving the one and only CC’d mob to come after me!

It was still fun, and I appreciate the efforts of the level 18 smuggler who at least knew to pull mobs off the healer when they went wild. I wasn’t so keen on people breaking my CC.

Nevertheless I shall be trying to find groups more often when I’m of a reasonable level (i.e. at least one level above the quest level)!

I’ve been playing a fair bit of SW:TOR when I’ve been finding time. My progression has been slow, mainly due to the server queues. I’m quite a causal player and seeing queue times of half an hour or more makes me play on a different server. I’ve now got characters spread over three servers;

The Red Eclipse

I have just one character on this server, it’s my guild (The Casual Travellers) server. This is my “main”, a level 16 healing Smuggler. Until recently she’s been neglected due to the queue times, but finally these seem to be settling down and so I’m finally getting to play on here more often.

Eye of Ashlanae

Two characters, both Imperial. This server is the unoffical second server for my guild, and you can often find our guild leader on here. Many of us retreat to this server when the queues become annoying because it’s never full. I’ve a couple of level 10 ish toons on this one.

Hidden Beks

This is the Munqui Tribe server and I’ve a couple of very low level Republic toons parked here. Unfortunately this server also suffers from queues almost as badly as the Red Eclipse, so, with regret, I nearly always hit the “Eye” instead of coming on here.  I say with regret because I know the Munqui’s and a finer bunch of people you would be very hard pressed to guild with.

–

Having so many characters means I’m leveling much slower than everyone else.. I know of at least one TcT on Red who now has two level capped toons, and I’m pretty sure that by now there are some Munquis on Beks with near capped characters. But, I’m here for the scenery, and I’m not going to rush. At least my “main” at level 16 is finally getting enough healing capability to actually start feeling like I am playing a healer of sorts, And I’m starting to engage more with the game. Even to the point of running a couple of dungeons Flash Points, though these are with pickup groups as I’m right at the bottom of the “leveling” ladder within the TcT.

I remember the first couple of times I read it, many years ago, I thought it was a jolly good romp with goody’s and baddy’s human and very alien. I re-read it earlier this year and the book I read was word for word the same, and yet what I read was a book about disease, and despair, and bullying and resilience. Even a “love” scene near the end was coloured differently.

Most odd, more than a little strange.

I wonder if I would encounter such a peculiar perspective shift were I to revisit WoW? Certainly the colours would be very different! The game for me became much more than pixels, and without the people it would become much much less again.

I am aware with SW:TOR that I’m taking a gamble and hoping that I will bond with the guild I’m in to the point where once again a game becomes “other”, because at the moment. I’ve played about 10 hours of Beta and I can say…. “it’s a game”.. I’ve played better and I’ve played worse.

Of course I played, not quite as long as I’d like, other Real Life commitments meaning that Saturday was not a play day, but I did play to level 10 (just). And without seeming too grumpy, WoW is the game I would compare it to. More so than Mass Effect 2.

So, first off I present Fflowers the Bounty Hunter, I was worried initially that the characters would be very samey… but this isn’t too bad, soon to disappear into the bitbucket.. ah well.

How did I find the game 1 month before release?

Well, I had 1 main complaint.. there are no subtitles except for the “foreign” language sentients and (usually though not absolutely always) the very last thing said. If you disable sound there are interactions where you see lips flapping for minutes and are then presented with a choice like “Yes, I’ll do it”, “You can stuff it”, and “what do you think Meko?” And I’m pretty sure I saw at least one without any subtitles showing at all!

Correction… my guildies have pointed out that there *is* a subtitles option… it’s not on sound, it’s on the general preferences:

End correction.

Here for my own personal reference are a couple of screenies of the settings I’m likely to use for my smuggler. When it gets rolled.. can’t be sure whether I’m rolling mel or fem yet. I’m fairly happy with the look of these, I’ve found that although I can create characters I don’t like the look of, I can usually get along with most, in fact it tends to be the more “perfect-human” ones that creep me out worst!

Also this weekend I downloaded the GameString adrenaline game client. Now *that* really is a beta. But for your edificati0n I do haev  a photo of it “in action” as it were, playing on a couple of devices .. A small netbook, an Android phone, and the main laptop. Not perfect by any means, the aspect ratio is wrong and I think the sound is missing though I didn’t have it turned on. Also the mouse control is more than a little difficult. Yes you *can* drive them main laptop from the remote device! Lag is about half a second.. so clearly work needs doing!

Guild.

TcT (The Casual Travellers), still there, not been scared off by the other members.

It’s awfully little to report, but then we have no game and so no drama, or even much interesting.
Wanting game now please.

Next up: Faffing around

Vent:

I have a spangly smartphone that can run Ventrillo, unfortunately it looks like T-Mobile block ventrillo, the bastards! I’ve done a fair bit of hacking to try to get around this problem, using my home linux machine (a pogoplug) as a “relay”, but although a small amount of progress was made using a program called socat, I haven’t yet managed it. Ah well, these things are sent to try us.  So no vent on my mobile, not that I actually want it yet.

OnLive:

Theres a game service out there called OnLive, it’s a fairly clever concept… you actually run a game on the OnLive servers and it just sends the video to your machine (and of course reacts to your keystrokes and mouse). This means your home pc can be a really weak machine without any Uber memory or Uber graphics card.

I tried the new UK servers and it works surprisingly well, it automatically adjusts the video quality if your bitrate drops a little, 1.8 Mbit is about the point where it gets unpleasant.

The lag doesn’t seem bad at all, certainly its quick enough to play an MMO with its enforced 1 Second global cooldown.

Unfotunately OnLive don’t have any proper MMO’s, a huge shame.

Anyway, if you read posts on forums about OnLive (and there are a couple of other startups looking into this area) there’s an awful lot of uninformed poo poo-ing that simply doesn’t agree with my actual experience. The fairly usual people sounding off authoritatively about a subject they know nothing about. A shame, they could easily trial games for quite a few minutes on OnLive to get a real impression of how it works. Warning I think OnLive is highly dependent on your broadband line, torrents, YouTube, less than 3Mbit or being in a different country will probably severely impact your experience.

StreamMyGame:

This is sort of similar to OnLive, only within your own house. So you have a game running on a PC and actually control it from another PC in the same house. It sounds pretty stupid, but actually with the advent of netbooks it isn’t as stupid as you might think. I’ve tried it and it kind of works. Unfortunately it is nothing like as slick as the OnLive experience, it does work, and might at a push be enough to play WoW, lag seems worse. I’ll be doing a little more experimentation. The company isn’t quite dead, but there was a over a year between major upgrade versions and they’ve only recently released 2.0 which I guess is only an incremental update to 1.9.

I’m thinking of bunging them 10$ just to try a less crippled version — 640×480 video isn’t enough to play e.g. WoW.

The biggest downside is that you have to have your own PC dedicated to “serving” the game.

Why:

Now, that’s 2 reviews of services that let you play a “power-game” on a netbook. You might just be asking yourself “why”? Well, I have a girlfriend who doesn’t play with me, and she only has a netbook which is incapable of running any modern 3D games. I’d like to try to get her playing an MMO with me, but that makes for hardware outlay, either a bigger laptop (which I doubt she would like), or a desktop, and both of those mean a $$$$ layout in time of recession.

Now a desktop means core hardware, monitor, keyboard and so on. If I can skip stream a game from a PC to a netbook I can skip the cost of a monitor and also retain portability WIN-WIN.

No-Conclusion:

Yup, no actual conclusions…. just ramblings.