SWTOR: Finding the Force

After feeling a bit fed up with the game I renewed my interest by making an alt. I made a Jedi Guardian which was great fun, especially as I found that perverting a good girl is even more interesting than playing a bad boy. I took her up to level 12 and Dark Side Level 1. There's supposed to be a cosmetic change as you turn Dark and after much squinting at my character I've decided that the reason she looks different is her bunny eyes have become tiger eyes. It's subtle but it's definitely there.

I like it too that she's a solid chunky woman rather than the usual fantasy game Frazetta clone. She looks more like a P.E. teacher than a model.

Perverting the storyline of course really tests it and most of the sidequests simply bounce you right back on track. If someone is trying to give you a quest reward and your dialogue options are something like:
1) Thank you!
2) Aww shucks you shouldn't of
3) mwa ha ha you'll never placate me, I'll be back to burn your village to the ground
picking option 3 gives you the exact same quest reward with perhaps a quip about how witty you are.

They're not all like that though and I managed to find a set of dialogue options that utterly appalled my fairly amoral helper on my Imperial Agent, in fact I lost 400 points of friendship with him in under 60 seconds. Essentially this means sacrificing 0.002% Slicing Mission speed and in exchange I get to utterly crush the universe beneath my Iron Fist forever. Well at least I would be doing that but a snag has cropped up and I can't actually beat her so I'm parking and collecting rest exp and a few daily pvp/flashpoint/space missions so I can deal with this spurious problem and win the game. At least that's where I seem to be, plotwise.

Of course that brings up the more serious issue of how can 2 million players all be the Universe's Greatest Hero? To Bioware's credit you do actually forget that there are other players who matter while doing your highly immersive class quests. Of course that's also a problem once the content is finished. Do I want to give up being the most feared Secret Agent in the Universe and be subs bench dps for our raid team?

Alting is a great solution and is working very well for me. I've started a Sith Sorceror. They are, I gather the fotm class, but more importantly you really feel evil playing one, as if you're Palpatine burning people up with Force lightning. One has to try hard not to cackle.

The Sith Sorceror: there's a lot to love

I've also managed to do several flashpoints which is a high point of this type of game for me. No matter how good the solo gameplay is I don't really love soloing any more which is why I play online games. Although some people are annoying most are pretty nice. About the worst I've had is people wanting to type my keys for me, down to pedantically explaining where my space bar is in case I didn't understand how to skip cutscenes. There's also been a lot of people who are friendly and joke around.

I'm particularly glad to see people respond to jokes as I tend to make them when I group with people and in recent times they nearly always get ignored. In games like WoW I'd certainly started to feel vaguely awkward about making jokes, rather as if I told a Two Ronnies style double entendre about women's breasts to a bunch of teenagers who confusedly wonder why I don't just say "tits". (The answer of course is that "melons" is funnier - but possibly only to people over 30).