Anyway, copy was bought and brought home, though not installed until the 23rd. Work, snow, work work, snow. You might be able to tell from my prose that I wasn’t terrifically over-excited about it anyway, though lots of my friends were having fun with it. I really only picked it up because I said (months ago) that I would, and because, well, I had nothing else I really wanted to play on the computer anymore, and my time with Skyrim is closely rationed (the spousal unit gets a turn now and then too).

I will say, I thought the opening cinematics were boss. I’ve only seen the generic one and the Republic side, but at some point I’ll make Empirescum characters and get to see theirs.

My smuggler is not impressed by the Senate

After that, creating a char and logging in and actually playing was… weird, in some ways. It looks and sounds a lot like SWG – how could it not, when they both used the same LucasArts material? Star Wars music is Star Wars music, after all (and it’s one of the reasons this is about the only game that has music I like – it’s REAL music, not some endlessly looping 20-second pseudo-medieval piece of crap with lots of Highlander-meets-Braveheart horns). I actually want to have the music on all the time, but the combat music is tied to it and I really, really hate combat music – so it’s off for now, but not willingly.

It plays and feels a lot like WoW or any other MMO you’ve played in the last 5 years. That’s intentional, and it’s actually pretty smart. I haven’t had to worry about learning new keybinds (much), and when I automatically reach for a key to open a UI element, it’s usually right. My main gripe with the UI is that at 1920 x 1200, which lots of people are capable of these days, it’s still gigantic and clunky, and it’s entirely unscaleable. Even WoW lets you do that without mods – c’mon, Bioware.

Friends have commented on how odd the lack of attention to the UI is, but I’m not surprised at all. Bioware make GAMES, not UIs – I remember the crappy one in DragonAge and in games before that, and I can just see the justifications from here. And, to be honest, I’d rather have a corking good game than a great UI, though I’d really rather have both. The UI feels a lot like early WoW, and hopefully that will change. It’s livable-with, anyway – more an irritant than a full-blown deal-breaker, and you know what a nerd I am about UIs.

I have, of course, made eleventy-million characters already. What can I say. Ironically, the one I’ve preferred playing so far is a tank, believe it or not, though I haven’t been all that good at tanking *all* the mobs with her in the one instance I did (but then we didn’t have any heals either). Even so, all the classes are fun and every class has its own personal story, which has of course been one of the SWTOR selling points.

I’ll admit, it’s pretty neat, but it’s also a little weird. For a while it felt as though I were playing a single-player game that happened to have other people in it – it still feels like that to some extent, but I’m getting used to it, and that feeling ebbs a little once you get off the newbie planet. It’s been really interesting to see that different classes are here / doing X / looking for Y / going to Z for different reasons – I don’t really want to say much because it’s spoilerish, but while the Smuggler and the Trooper base classes both start on Ord Mantell, for instance, their stories and reasons for being there are quite different, and will unfold differently. It’s… neat.

I’d be playing now except it’s Tuesday maintenance. You’d think we were playing WoW or something…

I’ve had far less time to play it than I’d like, work being what it is, but even so I’m hooked like a trout on a humpy. (Yes, I went and looked up fish fly names. That is how much I care for you.)

It’s also made me realise that while I love love love the start of a game, I’m not so hot on the middle bits and I positively dread the end bits. Which presumably makes me something of a freak in MMOs, since these days it’s all about the end game and I’m all about the beginning game. The same seems to hold true in single-player RPGs too.

My first Skyrim character just… didn’t work out (long story), so I rerolled. The second character “fit” much better and I played her like a maniac at every opportunity (sleep is for the weak). She got to level 20 pretty fast, but I got all anxiety-ridden about having too many quests, being werewolfed before we’d even been properly introduced, having too many quests, being caught between the stick-up-their-asses Empire and the stick-up-everyone-else’s-asses Stormcloaks, and having too many quests.

The first time I had NO clue what I was doing and just got sucked up in the current (and gave up around level 3). The second time I thought I knew it all, but I still got sucked up in the current; somehow I ended up with several criminal bounties on my head when I really didn’t think I’d done anything that bad. Mostly I really didn’t think anyone had seen me killing those Thalmor bastards escorting their prisoner out in the wilds; turns out some city guards saw me, and before I knew it (whoops! my axe slipped!) I’d killed them too and only realised what I’d done when the game told me “All the witnesses have been killed.”

Ulp. I don’t think I’ve ever killed witnesses before. I thought they were bad guys, honest guv.

So I re-rerolled.

What’s interesting is that all three experiences have been quite different, at least as much as they can be in the framework of a single-player RPG. It was only with the third character that I noticed a choice in the very first scene, the tutorial scene that basically just lets you walk (which isn’t as easy as it may sound for an old bat used to her arrow keys and playing this on a console). You don’t HAVE to follow the Imperial guy – you can follow the Stormcloak guy! It makes little difference in the grand scheme of things, but it’s illustrative of how Skyrim is as a whole: there’s so much stuff in that game, you could play it a half dozen times and probably still find stuff you’d never noticed before.

The game is giganormous, and the quintillion quests are almost an imposition. If I had my druthers, I’d just wander around exploring stuff and clearing out bandits, which is pretty much what I’ve been doing. In the Elder Scrolls games you really can ignore the story line if you want to, and it seems most obvious of all in this chapter. I’m stuck trying to decide who I hate less, Empire or Stormcloaks, in order to decide whether I want to join one or the other; I could stay neutral, but I’d be missing out on a big plot arc, so sooner or later I’ll make a decision.

In the meantime, I have some ore to mine and some mountain flowers to pick. Also: elk are hard to stalk.

Also: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/11/14 - cue hyena laughter because it’s oh, so true.

And now for something completely different (from last August, just to show it doesn’t snow ALL the time):

MMOs are designed as monogamous attention whores. I’m just not the target audience for that.

I’d add a link to the discussion and Psychochild’s original post but I, ahem, don’t know how to do that with G+. Yes, I’ve been on it for mumblemumble months. Sue me.

If you’re still reading, I’ll try to keep it brief. (By my own measure. You know, the one where 2500 words isn’t much.)

The MMORPG.com gig is starting to grind my gears a little. For one thing I am so running out of things to write about it’s not funny. For another, most of the time the people who read the column just want to fling poo, usually at me but often just at each other, and while I don’t read them all that often it still makes me want to wash my face and brush my teeth whenever I do. I miss the smart people here and wish I were more motivated to post on my own blog even though there’s no filthy lucre involved for doing so (and yes, I need the filthy lucre these days).

Today, someone made the effort to message me over there to make sure I’d actually read their comment on a recent column. Which essentially boiled down to “You’re okay even if you are totally up your own arse and you never consider anyone else’s point of view!” — which I happen to think is entirely unfair. I’m very likely up my own arse but I am nonetheless always aware of other points of view; I just don’t feel obligated to do more than mention them in passing if they’re not relevant to a column that is actually supposed to be, well, about MY experiences. Okay, player experiences in general, but I’m not doing a standup sketch in the style of Bill Bailey parodying Eddie Izzard doing James Mason (err, sounding like James Mason. You know what I mean.).

My byline or whatever those text blurbs are called: “[snip] discussing topics important to her as a long time player of MMORPGs”. Seems unambiguous to me as far as mandates go.

I’m also a little weirded-out by the responses the columns get. Most of the time something I think will get loads of comments just drops like a resting parrot dead duck, and stuff I think will evoke maybe a yawning agreement or two over coffee makes a bunch of ageing farts like me come out of the closet and join the Old Fart Gamer Pride March. Once or twice I’ve written something intentionally polemical, though the utter shit-storm over the SW:TOR post took me aback a little — then I read some of the comments and realised that most people were, as usual, commenting on something entirely irrelevant or entirely not under my control (like why the discussion thread was in the News forum), so I stopped reading them and almost immediately felt human again. Early on I wrote something I thought was going to be polemical and it sank like a dead whale shark, which was interesting if not entirely instructive.

Thing is, I don’t really know what’s going to be polemical and I don’t really want to. I’m not particularly cutting-edge and I don’t particularly like to stir shit-storms (debates, sure), so I don’t do it much. And it feels odd to think that I probably ought to be trying to do that more for the column gig, because if there’s one thing polemic and shit-storms do it’s generate hits, which is exactly what the site wants and, um, exactly what they’re paying me for. It’s just not something I like doing or something I’m good at. I’m good at rambling and… uh, rambling. I ramble really well. I could ramble in the Olympics! But polemic — not so much.

So these days I kind of feel like the old lady trying to sell lace doilies in the corner of a leather gear store — not bad for business per se, but a little out of place and all the dominatrixes look at me funny as they walk past browsing the new whips. And I decided to whinge about it here, because empty though it is this is still my place and I can write what I want, when I want.

I’ve been pondering the ethics of whether to leave the comments open on this post, because I see it more as a vent-post than a baby-seal cry for sympathy, but I’ll leave em open anyway. I’m not too proud to accept a pat on the back, though now that I’ve vented I’ve kind of done that for myself already. If you want to say something nice, go ahead. If you want to fling poo, I’ll fling it back, because this is still my place and I can do that if I want. That was my Cartman voice, by the way.

As it turns out you don’t get ALL the Shadow Warden dailies and ALL the Druid of the Talon dailies once you’ve unlocked both. You do your dailies outside, as usual, pop into the Firelands and do those initial dailies, as usual, then you get to choose which side’s dailies you’d like to do.

No-brainer there for me then. Jumping off cliffs and getting my ass roasted by birds, or slamming through spiders my hunter can also skin for all their leathery goodness? (No. Don’t ask me how a spider – a fiery spider – can be skinnable. I don’t wanna know and I can’t wait for the pair of fiery red and yellow boots those are going to make me. Shut up there with your realism, you.)

So anyway, quick recap for the 2 people who may not yet have jumped on the Firelands daily bandwagon.

1. Do a bunch of quests in Hyjal

2. Open up the dailies at the Sanctuary of Mallorne. Get enough tokens to:

3. Open up the initial dailies in the Firelands. Get enough tokens by rinse-repeating 2-3 to:

4. Open up the second set of dailies in the Firelands. Once both second sets are open, pick one every day. (Note that it’s worth doing the dailies on each side at least once since there are achievements tied up with interacting/saving/tickling various NPCs.)

5. Repeat 2-4 until you open up the final set of dailies, which is more like one daily in fact.

6. Repeat 2-5 until your head falls off — I haven’t finished each of the last 3 quests, so I don’t know what happens after. I am anticipating an earth-shattering kaboom

*cough* Anyone got a TSW beta spot? *cough*

Oh, and where’s my TSW beta spot? Eh? Eh? Which of you brain-dead flatworms stole my beta spot?