What is a good story anyway? Storytelling in LoTRO and the value of art

Bhagpuss recently put up an interesting post about Wuthering Waves that got me thinking about storytelling in MMOs, and the Lord of the Rings Online specifically.  I have started playing LoTRO again mainly because I was forced to.  The 32 bit servers are going to be permanently closed some time in August, and since LoTRO is one of my most played games I didn't want to lose all of my characters. After updating the client on a new PC that I recently migrated to, I transferred all my characters to one of the new 64 bit servers: Peregrine.  That's the North American roleplay server.  I figured most of the serious Tolkien lore grognards would move there, as so far World Chat has certainly not disappointed on that count. 

My main Silene, now and forevermore Sileeyn because the only name I was super attached to was taken on the server I chose.  I mean I guess I could have left her Silene-1 going forward, but I think that would have annoyed me even more.  Still, at least all my other names were available. 

The process of moving was painless.  I clicked one button to select all the characters on Arkenstone, and by the time I logged out and back in to my new server everyone was there.  Perhaps even more miraculous, nothing appears to be missing from their banks and all of my character names save one were still available.  However, of course, the name of my level 100 main "Silene" was taken.*  I had to switch her to "Sileeyn," which still slightly annoys me when I glance at her on the character select screen.

The last time I was playing it heavily I remembered quite liking the storytelling.  But over the years (it's been about four since I last logged), I had started to become skeptical of the stories being all that well done, and thought maybe it was just rosy goggles talking.  I mean they are presented solely as flat text, and it's not uncommon to have several quests all pointing you towards killing boars, or bears, or bandits in the exact same zone.  How entertaining could six quests in row about killing boars really be?  And how could a flat text presentation compare to the voice acting in Secret World, or the full voice acting and branching storylines of SWTOR?

The character I started to relearn the game, and since I wanted an excuse to adventure in the Shire again which I remembered finding quite charming.  The horse is one she got for the 15 year anniversary, one of the two 68% runspeed horses all of my new characters get when I roll one.  I also get an absolutely insane amount of slower horses, cosmetics, titles, character frames, fireworks and other assorted stuff to dig through.  On any new character usually put most of it in the bank unopened, almost immediately losing most of my bank space (until I can save up enough gold for more) forever since I never open any of it . . .

Now that I have played it again for a few evenings, I remember why I liked it so much.  It's because a lot of the stories work on two completely different levels.  On the surface they are entertaining stories on par with the better ones from say, EQ II or ESO. You get a strong sense of the personality of everyone you interact with, and many of the hobbit stories make me smile.  For example, there is an NPC ranting in the town square of Michel Delving about a conspiracy to deny equal access to the best pie fillings to everyone in the Shire, with  the uppity Tooks hoarding all the freshest ingredients.  Both the impassioned speech and the very funny responses from other hobbits standing nearby just ooze with the same charm as a lot of what Tolkien himself wrote about hobbits.   

But if you only appreciate the game based strictly on what is presented, a lot of what is on offer isn't really exceptionally well done.  Even World of Warcraft has some quests telling stories just as well written, and I don't consider that a particularly good MMO for narratives (just the opposite in many cases).  I wouldn't be surprised for anyone that isn't a fan of Tolkien to have the exact same reaction as Bhagpuss: "LotRO to me is just a lot of meaningless fetch and kill quests strung together. Which, honestly, is no bad thing in terms of gameplay but does absolutely nothing for me in terms of telling a story." 

Lathrae (another flower genus) is a Warden, which is a fairly technical class.  Every combination of three different skills triggers a different "gambit" which can range from massive burst damage, DoTs that can be stacked, taunts, heals or increased defense.  She can also switch between a melee and ranged stance on the fly, which also changes the output of a lot of her gambits.  It's a character that can handle almost any situation if you can keep all the combos straight in your head.   

It's really the second level the stories work on that elevates them.  In addition to being competent and at having text prose that is at least (but perhaps only) slightly above average for the genre, many of the stories are also filling in little details from the books in a way that is quite well done and satisfying.  For example, if you are familiar with Unfinished Tales, you know that Saruman was smuggling pipe weed out of the Shire and trying to keep it secret from Gandalf and the other members of the white council.  In public he ridiculed Gandalf for smoking it, and was too embarrassed to admit that he too enjoyed the stuff once he got around to trying it.  Gandalf knew that Saruman was sneaking it out of the Shire, but just assumed that Saruman being so secretive about it was a bit of harmless vanity.  In any case, at the end of an entertaining six step quest chain, you stumble on his smuggling operation and even get to read a note from "Sharkey" to his agents.**

At some point while I was away Standing Stone Games finally figured out how to have deeds work in a way that is decently fun.  The last time I played you had to grind out a bunch of these if you wanted access to all your trait points, which was quite annoying.  Now you get those just from levelling, like every other MMO with trait trees.  Instead deeds grant a small amount of points for the item shop, points towards virtues, and the occasional cool title.  Deeds primarily consist of killing large numbers of a specific mob type in a zone, but also include exploration (like finding all six farms in the Shire), questing and simply using certain abilities often.

That's just one example, a lot of neat details like that get filled in by quests in the game.  The writers use Tolkien's fiction like wooden frame that they fill in with a building paying homage to the work it draws upon.  As delightful as I find this element, I think it also explains why a lot of players don't actually find the storytelling as compelling as I do in LoTRO.  I personally would put it right up there with Secret World and SWTOR as some of the most solid storytelling you will find in a multiplayer game.  However, I have to think a lot of players don't recognize most of the callbacks to the source material. 

Virtues themselves grant your character small statistical boosts, and you can decide which ones you are interested in levelling.  Though for me personally most of these may as well not even be options, since I pretty much always go for the ones with swords by them for MOAR Damage.  This character is so fresh that I haven't even levelled the first three virtues for low level slots.  I like that virtues start with relatively low cap so you won't feel obligated to spend more time than you care to working on deeds.  You can pick three, get those up to six, and then completely forget about the system until much higher levels if you wish.

Unfortunately, you can't really appreciate the stories on both levels unless you are intimately familiar with the Lord of the Rings, including the Appendices of LoTR, the Hobbit and at the very least Unfinished Tales. Knowing the Silmarillion and the newer compilations collected by Christopher Tolkien and others doesn't hurt a bit.  For example, many of the stories set in Near Harad are actually rooted in brief notes about how Númenorians colonized the region in the second age, and a civil war between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms of Gondor during the third age.  To really fully appreciate some of what you see in those regions, you likely need to have read the Silmarillion, the Appendices, and the Fall of Númenor.  Some of the latter material has never been published previously save in the twelve volume History of Middle Earth.  I consider myself a pretty hardcore Tolkien nerd, but twelve volumes of apocrypha is way too much even for me.  Regardless, it's clear the game relies heavily on a player being a fan of the IP to "pop", which in the end almost certainly reduces their audience.***

The Shire is one of my favorite adventuring zones in any game, because it absolutely oozes with the charm and gentle humor of Tolkien's descriptions of hobbits.  This impassioned speech is about how the best pie fillings are being unfairly distributed.

This also raise a more general question in my mind: can you consider storytelling good if only those deeply versed in something outside of what is being presented can fully appreciate it?  I am of two minds about it.  On the one hand, there is a school of thought that for art to be "good" in some kind of objective sense, it must be enjoyable for almost anyone that takes the time to really consider it.  For example, during the Classical period composers intentionally simplified their compositions compared the Baroque composers that preceded them.  This was in part because Baroque compositions were considered too complex, and too difficult to appreciate for a typical listener.  The Classical composers wanted their compositions to be more accessible to a wider audience.  As my music appreciation professor explained it when I was an undergrad, the idea was that nearly any sane person should be able to enjoy the compositions.  This is sometime referred to as part of the classical ideal of universality.*!*

The game also fills in a lot of neat little details from the books in a way that is respectful to the source material.  For example, at the end of a long quest chain where I have been trying to figure out what happened to the hobbit locked in the cage on the left, I have discovered brigands that have been stealing pipe-weed for "Sharkey."  It's an oblique reference to material in Unfinished Tales, and a very cool easter egg....but only if you are deeply versed in Tolkien lore.

On the other hand, that kind of thinking is one step away from arguing that only the simplest pop art has any real value.  In my experience, if you are patient enough, art (by which I mean to include visual, written, musical or even game formats that combine all three at once) that makes you work a little bit to appreciate it tends to have a lot more staying power than something you can fully appreciate the first time you experience it.  I'm not sure myself where I draw the line between needless pretension or absurd "homework" expectations and art that I find complex and thought provoking.  But for me personally LoTRO is definitely on the correct side of that line, and I'll take Bach or Stravinsky over Mozart any day of the week :-)**!*   

*According to the character creation screen in LoTRO, female hobbits often have flower inspired names.  Silene is a genus of flowering plants, and I thought it sounded neat for a hunter that might be expected to take out foes before they even know she is there.

**That is the same pseudonym that Saruman uses much later when he scours the Shire in the Lord of the Rings books. 

***The first thing I posted here that got any traction was a designed to help you decide whether the game might be for you, and to poke some gentle fun at a few people that not only didn't enjoy the game much but actually seemed actively offended that the game dared to exist.  It's been a long time since the game has been visible enough to attract that kind of attention, which is in at least some ways better for all involved.

*!*It was way harder than I expected it to be to find a good reference to back up what I remembered from that music appreciation course I took over 20 years ago.  In my experience, Gemini is often making Google worse for really specialized searches.  It seems to now answer what it assumes you mean to ask rather than what you actually type.  I had to use three different sets of search terms get to that link, and it's still a bit off from what I had in mind.

**!*Except for Requiem, that's awesome.

Modern SWTOR Part II: the game in 2024

The last time I thought about returning to SWTOR was when Legacy of the Sith came out.*'*  The new cinematic had me hoping that it would be an expansion at least on par with Onslaught.  However, reports from when it came out almost immediately put me off of that idea, with the new content clocking in at about two hours per faction, and not even a new daily area to engage with after that (at least at launch). The development team behind the game claimed that the rest of a proper expansion would be released piecemeal over the course of the following months.  But without so much as a calendar of expected release dates, I was more than a bit skeptical.  The move of the game from Bioware to Broadsword, which has not done the greatest job with Dark Age of Camelot, moved me from skeptical to downright pessimistic. However, as it turned out I was largely wrong.

Eight days fifteen hours and thirty minutes:  that's how long it took me to do a level one to the end of the current storyline run, which for me was about half a year of my really limited spare time.  To try and keep my level closer to what each planet was designed for, and to give myself some time to enjoy each new gear set I got together, I purposefully skipped all XP bonuses.  However, I did do every solo quest I came across, including "exploration missions,"  which have the special icon shown above. These are side quests that used to be necessary to hit the cap in the launch era game.  However, in the modern game they are eminently skippable.  You could ignore all of them and still be over leveled for most planets when you get there.  I love doing them because they send me to areas of each planet I wouldn't likely explore otherwise.  I guess I could simply wander around at random and see everything that way, but I find exploring an area more engaging if I'm there for a reason.

The team has indeed released a proper expansion's worth of content since the launch of LoTS.  If you count everything released since February 2022 as one big expansion, it has more new planets and daily areas than anything released since the launch game.  It just took them two solid years to put out all that content.  Does a set of new zones still count as a single expansion if you release it in four to six month intervals for 2+ years?  Hard to say, but the fact remains that there is now a lot of solid content remaining after you finish the old base game. 

At some point while I was away they added galactic seasons, where you work your way towards long term goals by playing.  This season came with two armor sets, a couple of new vehicles, and a new stronghold.  While there were quests I could have done to speed my progress, I was able to get to the end of the track largely by doing whatever I felt like. I still have four out the eight class stories completely untouched on my new server.  However, I can imagine that this system would give me something worth doing on my schedule if I were done with that and stuck at the cap. I like the system a lot so far, but I also have the impression that season six was one of the better ones.

Based on my current play time, it takes about four solid days to play through the old base game.  This includes skipping all the group content, but doing all the optional exploration quests.  By the time I reached the end of the latest content added with Desperate Defiance, I had clocked in 8 days 15 hours and 30 minutes of playtime.  That is a heck of a lot of Star Wars to get through, and apart from the stuff that came out around 2016-2017 I enjoyed every bit of it.  You also don't need to do that middle part of the game anymore, because at some point Bioware added the ability to skip straight from Ziost to Ossus.*  Ossus is where I feel like the game picks up again after the old pre-Knights of the Fallen Empire content, and even after Ossus there is a lot to do now. 

Flying into the republic fleet to learn some new crafting recipes.  This star fleet functions somewhat like a capital city in most MMOs.  My ship is the smaller one in the middle.  Each class gets its own unique ship that functions as a portable headquarters, and is needed for most travel between planets.  

SWTOR stands as a fairly unique offering in the modern MMO landscape.  The science fiction meets fantasy setting of Star Wars in general sets it apart of course, with 90% of MMOs being pure fantasy and most of the rest being pure science fiction. I have always enjoyed the setting of Star Wars in general, and SWTOR is set during my favorite era.  In "modern" Star Wars there are only ever two sith at a time, and there are often only a handful of trained jedi (as few as two depending on the timeframe).  This kind of warps the entire setting around a few key figures, and sometimes makes it seem as if something that doesn't happen anywhere near Luke, Vader or one of the other incredibly rare force users is kind of irrelevant.  It also makes it hard to believe that you would be playing a jedi or a sith.  It would be like playing "A president of the united states" or "A Emperor of Rome."  It hardly makes any sense.  

Crafting is in a good overall place in the modern game, at least while levelling.  It's dead easy to make level appropriate blue gear most of the way up, and relatively easy to make purple gear.  Blue quality gear that you craft can be deconstructed for a 60% chance to learn the recipe for a purple quality item.  These crafted purples are higher quality than anything else you are likely to run across while levelling.  That said, by level 75 the crafting really tapers off, with gear from various NPC vendors completely eclipsing gear that's easy to craft.  You can in theory craft gear just as good, but the time and resources that would be needed to do it are utterly absurd.  

In contrast, during the Old Republic Era, you are tripping over force users.  It allows stories set anywhere and everywhere to leverage the "space wizards meets Firefly" feel of the movies without creating logical dissonance.  It also makes it seem a lot more realistic that, for example, my smuggler would be willing to take on a sith or my imperial agent would take on a jedi.  While certainly powerful, force users aren't gods walking.  During the Old Republic era, if you don't know how to deal with a force user you won't be in a profession that involves serious amounts of combat for very long.  In the modern movie era, meeting a jedi would be like meeting an wizard as powerful as Merlin in real life.  "Wait, magic is real? How in the hell do you even fight that?"  I also like that no-one knows or cares about the Skywalker name.  The idea of an ordained chosen one that makes everyone else in the galaxy largely irrelevant offends my egalitarian streak.**  All in all, I feel like the Old Republic era leverages the most distinct aspects of the Star Wars IP with much less of the continuity baggage that can sometimes trip up fiction set in the Skywalker era.

The new stronghold everyone got for free this season is in Copero, a pretty planet largely inhabited by the chiss (the same race as Admiral Thrawn from the Star Wars TV shows Rebels and Asoka if that means anything to you).  Since I was playing up a chiss agent, this suited me quite well. 

Mechanically, I also find the game really enjoyable.  It's one of the few MMOs I can think of that does level scaling well.  Instead of the enemies scaling along with you, which makes levelling seem completely pointless, you have a level cap and a soft stat cap that changes depending on the planet you are on.  If you go to a low level planet with a high level character, you will get scaled down but still feel more powerful because you have more abilities and stronger attack rotations.  At the same time, you never "gray out" any enemies and become an immortal godling that certain enemies cannot challenge in any way.  You can always get killed if you play badly enough.

One of the things I really like about SWTOR is that the combat generally focuses on groups of mobs rather than trying to pull one at a time.  The strategy you use with a big group of weak mobs, like here, will be different from what you use against various group combinations that include silvers (roughly twice as strong as a normal mob) or golds (around 1.5 times as strong as a silver) mobs.  It gives the combat, even while out questing solo, more variety than in most MMOs.

A major change since the last time I played is that you can use a much wider variety of skillsets on characters now.  Choice of combat style has been largely separated from choice of class, and thus class narrative, allowing you to mix and match freely for whatever combination you like.  For example, if you want your jedi to be a secret sith that sprays force lightning everywhere when no-one is looking, you can do it.  If you think your bounty hunter would specialize in taking foes down with a sniper rifle you can do that too.  If you refuse to play any character that can't kick opponents in the nuts, you can now play four different class stories using smuggler combat styles.  At the same time, if you are a purist the original combat styles work pretty much like they always have.  You can still play up an agent that plays exactly like you remember from the 2010s if you want to.  

My favorite mini-game in SWTOR is Star Fighter, a PvP system that plays a lot like MechWarrior Online or World of Tanks among games I'm familiar with.  Teams fight to hold bases or engage in deathmatches.  As you play you earn points that can be used to upgrade one of sixteen or so starships.  Ships are split into four classes, dogfighters, interceptors, gunners and bombers, each of which plays very differently.  My favorite class is the bomber (one of my four is shown above), which has high defense and specializes in taking and defending bases.  However, in matches with no objectives to defend, they tend to be pretty useless, so I have had to build out some fighters and interceptors.  I suck quite badly with gunships, and so haven't bothered to build any ships of that class up.  

The game has also added  mechanics for player engagement stolen from Android games. Despite how terrible that sounds, they work surprisingly well.  First, there are now daily login rewards, like pretty much every MMO these days.  In SWTOR they are nice little bonuses, but nothing so amazing you will be upset if you can't log for a few days.  However, the bigger addition is seasonal reward tracks that each run for a few months and allow you to work towards bigger rewards at your own pace.  The last PvE track that I worked through yielded two sets of cosmetic armor,*** two new mounts and unlocked rooms in a pretty new house (stronghold) as I worked through it.  Each day you will move the track along just by playing.  Though you can go out of your way and progress it more quickly by doing specific missions, I maxed out the last one just by doing whatever I felt like each day.  There is a similar parallel track to work your way through by doing PvP matches.  I have made no progress on the latter because I rarely enjoy PvP.   However, I like that there are different reward tracks catering to different playstyles.  Now maybe if there was a track for crafting stims or dancing near mailboxes everyone would be happy . . .  

What the game is generally known for among MMOs is dialogue trees, one example of which is shown above, that slightly alter the storyline as you play.  Some of them lead to fairly significant changes like characters dying off or being saved, or in one case an entire planet perhaps getting destroyed (though it will get locked into a "just about to blow up, finish what you need to do" state in that case).  However, for the most part they are largely cosmetic changes to the storyline, with characters you interact with reacting differently depending on whether you are a saint, a complete asshole, or something in between. That isn't to say that the choices don't alter the feel of the narrative significantly.  I put real thought into the personality of most characters I play, and even get a bit upset if there are no dialogue options in one of these trees that does a good job reflecting "what my character would say." That's light years beyond the roleplaying options in most MMOs, which tend to occur completely in your head if at all.****  

If there is any overriding theme of the modern game it's player choice.  How long it takes you to run up to the cap is really up to you.  On my playthroughs I do every quest I come across that isn't for groups, including the optional "exploration missions," but not generally bonus missions (extra missions for players that want to revisit a planet later, some time after completing the main story there).  If you stopped to do all the group content and bonus missions, I imagine you could double my playtime.  On the other hand, if you stick strictly to only what's needed to hit the appropriate level for each new planet, I'm sure you could at least half it.  Crafting is in a similar place.  It's there and useful, you can pretty easily be using level appropriate purple gear all the way up if you engage with it.  However, you also very clearly don't really need gear that good.  You will be hitting your soft stat caps even with gear from quests on every planet unless you really rush things and do no optional content at all.  

Though the income of the game is much reduced from the days when it was hovering just outside the big five, with the move to Broadsword it does seem that a large proportion of the income the game brings in is finally being reinvested instead of frittered away on other games. Overall, I'd say SWTOR is in a better place than it has been in years.

Regardless, for me the biggest selling point is that there is a very long "Star Warsy" narrative on offer with a lot of variety depending on the choices you make as you go, and very little overlap between the Imperial and Republic perspectives.  Other MMOs with similarly compelling narratives, such as FFIV and Secret World, generally only have one story to play through for everyone.  All in all, I would say SWTOR is in the best place that it's been in years.   Mechanically, it's maybe not quite to the heights of the launch-to-Revan era game to my tastes, but damn close.  Further, if playing through a Star Wars story is a selling point for you, the game that starts after you hit the end of the launch era game is now finally just as expansive as the game to that point.

*'*Edit: You can read about what I though of the game to that point here. 

*Though I often still play through the parts you can skip, because the game defaults to certain story choices when you choose the skip option.  Those often don't fit what my character would have done.  If they ever add the ability to tell the game what choices you would have made going through those chapters, I might never play them again.

**One of the things I really liked about the Last Jedi is that it ended implying that the force was for everyone.  One of the things I found really execrable about the Rise of Skywalker was that they completely undid that, and made the story about a "chosen one" again.

***Well at least that's how I use it.  You can in theory gather up a bunch of mods and give them any stats you like, though I am a bit skeptical that anyone would ever bother. 

****Makeb, shown in the screenshot above, was the first planet released that allowed you to have gay flings with NPCs.  In the old base game, flirt interactions were gender locked and strictly hetero.  In more modern content, you can eventually make out with pretty much anyone you spend enough time with.  Of course even that freedom pales before the freedom some really modern games offer.  

Modern SWTOR Part I: Launch to the "Knights of" era

Since about January my main MMO has been Star Wars: The Old Republic.  It is likely roughly tied with Lord of the Rings Online for the game that I actively played for the longest stretch.  I subbed up the day of launch in December 2011, and stayed subbed until the 5.2 patch after Iokath was released, which I believe was in April 2017.  That is nearly six solid years subbed up and logging in, which for me is a hell of a long run on any game.  I love the Star Wars setting, and I love the variety of outcomes you can get on different playthroughs of SWTOR due to each class having a different 1-50 story, and dialogue choices.  For most that that time I was happy as a clam, or a pig in mud, or whatever your favorite animal based euphemism for contentment may be. Unfortunately, Bioware seemed to completely lose their way  around 2016 with the launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne, and to my tastes it took a really long time for the game to recover.

Shown here is a map of one part of Corellia,  and the kind of content I was accustomed to until Knights of the Fallen Empire came out.  The map on the left is the zone I am currently exploring, which has a ton of nooks and crannies, places that serve no purpose save to enhance immersion like a bar with a working juke box, and perhaps a dozen quests.  This is itself just one zone of a larger planet, which has five areas of roughly the same size.  The switch from this style of expansive explorable content to the tiny zones with little to see of the "Knight's of" expansions, cerca 2016, felt like a major downgrade to me.  It took years for the developers to get back to this style of worldbuilding.  

I had a lot of issues with the game during the "Knights of" era.  My biggest gripe was the switch from open world areas, that felt like actual planets, to a really linear storyline that played like a visual novel and a MMO had a love child. That isn't to say that the expansions didn't have some engaging stories in them.  There are actually excellent on your first playthrough, and I enjoyed them quite a bit when they first came out.  Both Knights of expansions contain polished content with high production values, and feel very cinematic the first time you see them.  However, they offer very little new on subsequent playthroughs. Choices offered turn out to be largely flavor once you have tried out several of them, and Empire and Republic characters get completely identical stories.  In addition there are very few open world exploration zones, and even in those few little really worth discovering. Perhaps worst of all, the moment-to-moment gameplay consists largely of cutscenes interspersed with some of the most bland and repetitive fights SWTOR has to offer.  Tons of nearly identical corridors are stuffed with mobs that you have to take down to progress to the next cutscene.    

This is the view out of the republic spaceport on Corellia. It's likely one of the least attractive planets in the game, and I still think it's an impressive sight. This also is a  tiny section of the map above. Even back in 2011 SWTOR was considered an ugly game by many, and nowadays the graphics are often considered almost laughably bad.  Maybe it's because I grew up in the Atari / Nintendo era, but I have always found these criticisms completely baffling.  For a game that runs well on a toaster, I think the graphics are quite impressive. 

So in KotET and KotFE, we got expansions that for me were strong at first glance but rapidly became really boring on repeated playthroughs.  This was in sharp contrast to the rest of the game where high replayability was a major strength.  Overall, the gameplay in KoTET and KotFE ended up feeling like a major downgrade compared to the game up until that point.  For me that was compounded by the gearing system of the 5.0 era.  Until 5.0 end game instances and PvP rewarded points that you could save up and use to eventually buy the gear set of your choice, like pretty much every other MMO.  However, Bioware seemed to think this was letting players gear up too quickly at the cap.  Seemingly in an attempt to try and stretch out the endgame, SWTOR  switched to a "command crates"  system where you were rewarded crates yielding gear completely at random.  The odds of any given crate having a piece of gear that was an upgrade you needed got lower and lower the closer you were to a full set at a given item level.  It was incredibly frustrating to open several crates in a row and get vendor trash out of all of them.  

As in most MMOs, the true endgame is fashion for players that aren't heavily into raiding or PvP, and SWTOR (often called "space Barbie" by players who have their tongues only slightly in their cheeks) is no different.  In fact, it's arguable better than most because in addition to your character there is a whole group of NPCs that you can also dress up.  Shown here is the squad of the current character I am playing, most of whom only have slight changes to their default gear (a helmet here, a pair of boots there).  Any humanoid companion is completely customizable, with six equipment slots to swap in and out in addition to various choices for their head.

Added to storyline that I found overly repetitive and a gearing system I hated, the pace of new content releases also started to slow to a crawl.  By Spring 2017 the only thing keeping me in the game was the hope that a new area coming out in April would be a return to form for the studio. Unfortunately, when it finally was released the new area ended up being Iokath.  To this day Iokath is probably the area of the game I enjoy the least on a normal 1-to-cap playthrough, and I cancelled my sub about a month after it came out.  After that, watching from the sidelines I saw what started as a slight content drought start to approach the Chilean desert of true maintenance mode.  

Even companions like M1-4X here, that don't wear equipment, have some customization options if you go hunting for them.  To get this paint job, I had to add two-factor authentication to my account and fly out to a space station at the edge of the galaxy to find the vendor that sold it.

After Iokath, no new explorable areas would be added until December 2018, nearly two years later.  Even that new area, Ossus*, only contained about four hours of new content.  Perhaps a week of evenings if you got serious about it and maxed out your local reputation with dailies. Stories in the gaming press of personnel assigned to SWTOR and financial resources that the game brought in being funneled into failed projects like Anthem did nothing to make me question my lack of loyalty.  For me, it only confirmed that I was right to walk away when I did.   

Flying in to Ossus to take screenshots. By the time Ossus came out it late 2018, I think Bioware had finally gotten the message that players really like having new areas worth exploring. Even a very slickly presented story isn't enough by itself to keep most players engaged, especially if it's essentially the exact same story every time you play it.

All of this kept me out of the game until Onslaught was released in late 2019.  By then it looked like enough new content, Ossus, Dantooine, and two new planets with Onslaught, had been added for it to be worth sticking my head in again.  I enjoyed Onslaught quite a bit, but it still only kept me entertained for a few months.  I considered coming back for Legacy of the Sith, but that turned out to be more like a nice patch than an actual expansion, with two or three hours of content for most players and not so much as a new daily area when it first launched.  For the last three years I have been keeping an eye on the game**, waiting for enough new content to come out for it to be worth subbing.  I would say as of the last big patch the game is finally there, and I think I'll be settling in for a while (eight months and counting).  

Once you land on Ossus you find an interesting set of zones with a unique orange sand on black basalt aesthetic, and a story that plays very differently depending on whether you are aligned with the Empire or the Republic.  Though not as large as most launch era planets, it does feel like a proper new area that is rewarding to explore.  

Based on what I've seen since I came back in January, I would say that the team has finally found their new groove.  There are a good bit of new content and activities to talk about.  It's not all peaches and kittens, but on the balance  the current game is better to my tastes than it has been in years. I thought that was what I sat down to write about, but my lead in completely got away from me.  More on the current game in the next post!

*Thought short, I did eventually find out that Ossus is excellent with a cool aesthetic and a fun little story.  That's actually a good synopsis of the modern team's development style.  They don't put out much content, but what they do release is well done and tends to feel like a solid addition to the game.

**By "keeping an eye on the game," I mainly mean reading Shintar's excellent  Going Commando.  She covers SWTOR really thoroughly, and has a generally sunny take on the game that I enjoy.   

On difficulty

In a recent post over at Parallel Context, Redbeard mentioned that he doesn't like playing a "godlike character."  His main point is that he finds it immersion breaking from a story perspective, and I completely agree with that.  However, that and another recent incident in SWTOR got me thinking about difficulty in MMOs more generally. 

There is a difficulty balance a MMO has to hit for me to stay engaged.  I play MMOs mainly to relax, so they can't be too hard.  If I get stressed out whenever I play a game, I won't play it for long.  What I do for a living is engaging and I am lucky, but it also gives me about all the stress I can handle.  At the same time, I also hate it when a MMO is too easy.  If I do something really stupid I deserve to die.  If it's almost literally impossible for me to get killed doing anything I normally do in the game, that feels too easy and kind of pointless.  

For example, the last time I played retail WoW, it was overall way too easy.  It wasn't a total deal breaker for me because I had Classic "right over there" on another server if I wanted it.  However it did mean that I got bored after very short stints doing overland quests when I was in Retail, and actually needed dungeon runs to break them up.  That is a strange way for me to play. Normally running around doing quests and soaking up storylines is my favorite activity in a MMO.  Becasue of this, during my last stay I spent most of my playtime in Classic.  To my tastes Classic gets the difficulty balance just right. Quests are rarely a huge challenge, but if you head into Murloc territory and start pulling solo, or do something similarly reckless, you will end up either going down in a blaze of glory or running for your life.  

EQ II, TSW and a few others with fixed difficulties also manage that tightrope walk using one challenge level for everyone and well balanced classes.  However, for the most part MMOs that get the difficulty "juuuust right" to my tastes are ones where you get to adjust the difficulty yourself.  Some older MMOs, like DAoC and EQ do it indirectly by simply having classes that vary wildly in the situations they can handle well when questing solo.  If I want slow but safe I can pick a melee class with good defense like a Paladin or Shadow Knight.  If I want something faster paced but risky, I can go with a squishy bolt caster like an Eldritch or Wizard.  And so on.  

Another tack that some MMOs have also started playing around  with is letting players actively and directly adjust the difficulty as they play.  For example, SWTOR does this in an really interesting way.  When questing solo you always have a companion out, and you can have your companion act as a healer, a tank or a DPS.  If you set the companion to healer, the game becomes very easy and you really have to go out of your way to get killed doing any but the hardest content.  At the opposite extreme, just normal questing can keep you on your toes if you set your companion to DPS (particularly once you get past the launch era content).  A DPS companion will merrily get killed right alongside you if you overpull. 

The MMO that has taken this to the greatest extreme, at least among ones I am familiar with, is  Dungeons and Dragons Online.  Every quest in the game has a variety of difficulty settings you can choose when you begin the quest.  If you want a challenge, you can crank the difficulty all the way up to Reaper 10 and get one shotted by trash mobs even on a very strong character.  At the opposite extreme, on Casual you could clear most quests with terrible character build while wearing pajamas and using an unenchanted club.  There are 12 difficulty setting in between those, so if you can't dial up the challenge you prefer you just don't know what you are doing.  

Of course DDO is also a weird edge case in a lot of ways.  Due to the extreme flexibility of the character creation system,  PCs can easily vary by close to an order of magnitude in terms of defenses, hit points, and DPS output.  Add to that the ability to create characters that do monstrous damage out to LoS or that do terrible damage outside of melee range, and that can either locate and disarm traps or have to disarm traps by setting them off with their face, and you have a game that nearly necessitates the ability to set your own challenge level. Regardless, DDO does makes me wonder why scalable difficulty isn't a thing in more MMOs.  LotRO, the other game from the same studio, apparently even figured out how to implement a similar system with landscape mobs somehow.  If these two mid-tier games with tiny development teams can figure it out, why isn't everyone doing it?

Beyond my preference for the difficulty of normal content,  another issue is difficulty spikes.  Now some variance in difficulty is to be expected, and an occasional challenge can be a nice way to punctuate major story beats.  That is not what I am talking about.  I am talking about a game that has one range of difficulty for the first 100 hours, and then throws in a random five minute segment that is way way outside of that range.  I am talking about something that feels like a turn based RPG with a Street Fighter II Bison fight jammed randomly into it.  Bonus points if  the difficulty spike involves forcing me to play some NPC with completely different mechanics from my normal character.  Double-triple bonus points if getting through that segment is the only way to progress the main story line.   A few nights ago SWTOR hit me with all of those.  

There is an era of content that has aged poorly compared to most of the game, roughly Knights of the Fallen Empire through the end of the traitor flashpoint arc.*  I have a whole post coming on that content from a personal historical perspective, so I won't go into detail here.  But towards the end of it, there is a fight where you are stuck controlling  a walker instead of your actual character.  This walker has completely different controls from not only your character, but also every other walker in the game.**  After having the difficulty variance of the game pretty much exactly where I enjoyed it for more than 100 straight hours of playtime, this fight kicked my ass for close to a solid hour.  After try five or six, I was so ticked off that I almost rage-quit on the spot.***  

Regardless of any other consideration, I think if there is one golden rule of difficulty it's this:  always give your players what you have trained them to expect.  If a player spends 100+ hours in your game experiencing one range of difficulty, that is the level of difficulty they enjoy.  You can have more challenging content available, but you need to warn them that it's coming and give them a way to avoid it if they wish. In other words, make it completely optional. If your game is lovely path wandering its way through forests, fields and meadows, you can't just have a random brick wall in the middle of it.  Even if you hand players a sledgehammer and say "Just grind your way through this to progress, more lovely sights on the other side!", you will have damaged player trust at best and lost them altogether at worst.  

I am continually baffled to see so many game designers screw up this one thing that seems like common sense.  Now I can certainly think of at least ten reasons why this is easy to do without meaning to.  For example, player skill levels vary, and one player's molehill is another's mountain.  But holy cow, in a live service game when you see a ton of players complaining about something, maybe consider addressing it?

*In fact, there is an option in game that will let you skip all of it just by taking a quest on your ship.  It's never a good sign if that many players need a way to skip a big hunk of your game!  I guess adding the skip option is easier than going back and polishing any of it at this point.  Regardless, on my most recent playthrough, I didn't skip the "Knights of" content because I wanted to see how it played differently if you were dating one of the main characters in it.  I could have skipped that fight at any time, but it would have broken the part of the story I was working on and started me out a few months later assuming choices different from the ones my character would have made. While I don't regret playing it all one more time, I will certainly be using the skip option from here on out.  

**For some insane reason there are actually four different segments where you are forced to play a walker instead of your character in this era of content.  The last one is by far the worst of them, and thankfully the last that they ever did.

***I did get it on try six or seven.  The walker has six abilities.  One ability makes the fight fairly easy.  The other five will get you killed over and over again if you try to use them for anything except filler while you wait on the cooldown for the "good ability."  These abilities exist almost entirely as newb traps in the modern game.  To add to the stupidity of it all, you will never encounter mechanics like this anywhere else in the game.  Some game designer lost their damn mind, a team looked at it and said "This is fine", and it remains in the game to this day.  

EQ II Origins looks to be a win for Daybreak

The Everquest II origins server looks like it is going to be a hit for Daybreak.  Two observations lead me to this conclusion. A thread started about the launch over on the MMORPG reddit is surprisingly positive.  You can also read more about the final ruleset there. A well received post on that board is a minor achievement in its own right because, as nearly as I can tell, the people that hang out there hate the vast majority of MMOs. However, another really positive sign in my mind is that players in the beta are so passionate that they have already started up a ruleset specific wiki.   A large community seems to be gelling around this server.  

Of course the real proof will be in what things look like six months from now.  Nearly any MMO can spin up a new server and get huge crowds at launch.  However, it remains to be seen whether players will stick around like they did for the Classic servers in WoW.  I will say that, on reflection, I believe they have chosen the right era.  Far enough back to feel distinct from current servers, but not so far back that really punishing systems like the crafting sub-combines are in.  We are well past the days when anyone is willing to pay a sub fee to play "Second job: the game."

An aside . .

I'm not dead. I even have three half written posts in the wings, one of which is a 2024 view of SWTOR.  As soon as I get to take a breath they will go up (it's been a crazy year for me).  However, this was just such low hanging fruit I couldn't resist a quick post.  I hope your year is going well!

EQ II Origins server: looking forward to a look back

 So in the latest producer's letter, Jen Chan at Daybreak/ Darkpaw games mentions that some time this year EQ II will be releasing an Origins server.  While the details aren't completely nailed down, the idea seems to be a server that mimics the launch era game in all of it's clunky glory.**  I definitely plan to stick my head in just to see how much of what I think I recall from that era was real versus a fever dream created by the fog of memory.

The main thing I remember is how much more insanely complicated crafting was.  You couldn't just craft an item, heck no!  I remember having to craft a sheet of paper, ink and a pen before I could craft so much as a single low quality spell scroll.  Heck, I even have a really vague memory of perhaps having to buy crafted metal nibs to even be able to make a pen, but surely I am mistaken?  I assume that's just something conjured by my brain filling in details based on what the crafting felt like, rather than how it actually worked.  I mean crafting more than three subcombines to make a single spell scroll would just be absurd, wouldn't it?

Regardless, to this day the part of EQ II that gives me the biggest hit of nostalgia is the sound and animations that come up when you are crafting.  When I played the launch era game, 90% of my time was spent crafting spell scrolls.  I was flabbergasted by the depth of it compared to anything else I had played by that point.  I also got quite wealthy selling them on the auction house, at least by launch era standards.   Half of the classes desperately needed them, and the crafting was so absurdly time consuming and repetitive that relatively few players made it past the lowest levels of scribe.

I also recall the combat parts of the game skewing very heavily towards group content.  Even back then I was a devoted soloist.  It didn't take me long to hit a soft wall where I had done all the solo quests I knew how to find, and the only method of progression left to me was heading out to grind random mobs.  I didn't find the prospect very attractive, and so once I got tired of "Scribe: the MMO" I bounced.  

However, the game did have an interesting feel to it that the modern game doesn't quite recapture.  A feeling that the crappy little neighborhood I was in was a real place, that I was in very real danger when I went outside the city, and that I really was a burgeoning craftsman slowly learning a trade and plying my wares.   Despite the modern game being superior in nearly every way that matters to me, I still find my self looking really forward to stepping back in time for a weekend or three.   Heck, maybe older more patient me will even like that clunky slow-paced relic more than younger me did.   

[Edit: Update]

**According to Bhagpuss it will actually be 2006 era Everquest II, by which time at least some of the rough edges of the launch game had been rounded down, including the crafting being much more straightforward than what I recall.  I bounced some time in 2005, and so didn't realize how much the game changed in the first year.  I don't think I played it again until maybe 2008-2009.  

However, I am still looking forward to it. For me personally a lot of what I actually vaguely miss was a random neighborhood of one of the two cities feeling like such an important place.  Each city had three or four neighborhoods that you might start in depending on your race.  They functioned sort of halfway between an older game like EQ where members of a different race might start on a completely different continent,  and a more modern game where everyone, or at least everyone in the same faction, has the same initial starting area.  Either way, I will be checking it out.  If they bring back that weird system where you didn't even pick your final class until level ten or something, so much the better.  Not that late 2004 or 2006 EQ II is a game I would ever be likely to get as heavily invested in as the modern game.

Very late thoughts on Cataclysm coming to Classic

During Blizzcon it was announced that early next year the Classic servers will be moving on to Cataclysm, as I am sure anyone that reads this blog is already well aware.  While likely all but inevitable (crazed ideas like alternate universe classic branches aside), this decision likely ensures that I won't be going back to WoW for another few years. 

It's certainly not because I hated Cataclysm. In fact Cataclysm was probably when I got most heavily invested in WoW overall.  It's literally the only time I managed to hit the cap and not bounce.  In every other era, once I hit the cap and finished farming up all the mounts I cared about I was done.   In Cataclysm, I hit the cap and kept playing for at least another six months.

The main reason I stopped playing WoW a little over a year ago was that Blizzard ticked me off by being terrible to their employees, even for a gaming studio.* Now of course it wasn't something they suddenly started doing, it was just back in 2021 when news of what horrible place it had been all along finally leaked.  Really egregious revelations like "The Cosby Room" completely soured me on the studio.  I kept waiting for some sign that things had improved, but to me announcements and leadership changes always came across as meaningless lip service with little intent behind them. 

That may be getting better now that Microsoft is buying out Activision.  I presume the worst of Blizzard's cultural practices will begin to be somewhat reigned in.  I mean it will still be a large gaming development studio, so it won't be rainbows and kittens.  But it does seem likely they will manage to improve (i.e., move up the abysmal industry norms) to the degree that I could begin to support them financially without moral qualms.

Unfortunately, this is coming a bit too late for me because Cataclysm itself is a barrier.  Despite how reviled the expansion was, I enjoyed it quite a bit in 2010.  However, even ten years on I still feel like I played the PvP to death.**  Added to that, with years of hindsight I can also see that the pre-Cataclysm era of WoW is simply a better game to me.  For me, Lich King was the largest that the "good version" of WoW ever got, and apparently I only have about six more months (at most) to play that version if I want to. 

With hindsight, Cataclysm marked the beginning of the end of the WoW I loved, when the process of gradually simplifying the game began in earnest.  Changes to core systems from Cataclysm on don't feel like fully considered quality-of-life changes, like the ones that came in Burning Crusade and Lich King. Instead, they feel like a fruitless attempt to widen their audience past core MMO players.  For example, talents became simpler and simpler from Cataclysm on, until they got reduced to one choice every five or ten levels.  While that is indeed much easier for a casual player to understand, it also makes most levels incredibly boring.  Your hit points and mana go up, and that's about it. 

Piece-by-piece Blizzard began removing design elements that existed solely to create the illusion of a realistic world with sensible rules. For example, needing learn how to use your weapons and practice with them to be proficient eventually got tossed aside.  Choice of pet for a hunter became almost solely a cosmetic decision.  Missile weapons stopped needing ammo.  Quests to learn new class abilities got pulled.  The process kept going, and by the time I last played retail it felt more like a lobby based dungeon crawler that happened to be embedded in a MMO than a true MMORPG to me. 

I was tempted to go back for Lich King Classic.  I missed it the first time around because I didn't enjoy the endgame of Burning Crusade, and didn't make it back to WoW again until after Cataclysm launched.  However, the revealed awfulness of Blizzard has kept me away recently purely out of protest.  Now I have seemingly missed my chance to level through the Lich King era game for a second time, they will be setting it on fire again in just a few months.

What somewhat surprised me is that Blizzard also has no plans to create any permanent "locked in the Lich King" era servers.  They already have a few servers for the launch era game, I just assumed they would do the same for Lich King since it's so often touted as the best version of WoW.  It's certainly when the game peaked in popularity.   If the base game is going to be post Cataclysm going forward, is it really still Classic? 

At this point the only upcoming version of WoW "Classic" that seems likely to tempt me is Legion.  By all accounts the implementation of Artifacts in it was a lot of fun.  Yet that is surely at least two or three years out.  So it seems like my long absence from WoW is likely to continue even if the culture of the studio does improve once Microsoft takes over. 

*A bar so low that it is already resting comfortably on the floor at most studios!   

**It was a little odd that the one era in which I didn't bounce right off the endgame of WoW was in an expansion that everyone seemed to hate. However, what is especially odd for me is that I spent most of my time at the cap doing PvP for gear.  I'm not super competitive to start with, and  PvP has to be balanced "just so" for me to enjoy it.  I want meaningful and disparate choices on offer, yet I also want all of them to be solidly useful to a team.  If there is a useful but unpopular role I can specialize in, like setting up to defend a spot, so much the better.  Very few MMOs have ever managed that balancing act well to my tastes, and in WoW your PvP specialization options are basically healer, DPS,  more DPS, or Even Moar Deeps.  Yet during the Cataclysm era I did enough PvP to  wrack up the 1000 honorable kills achievement and buy a full set of PvP epics.   I even eventually got the staff I was drooling over in that post.  For me that's a heck of a lot of time spent doing endgame stuff in general in a MMO, much less PvP.  I was clearly enjoying it.