Star Wars: The Old Republic and apologies

Okay, first with the apologies part. I'm sorry I haven't posted since November, things have just been crazy. Plus I've been depressed with the news that my favorite MMORPG magazine won't be published anymore (at least for a long while). Ah, but at least they converted my subscription to their tablet magazine?

Anyways, on to Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR), the best thing since sliced bread. Well, almost. Is it a WoW-killer? No, I don't think anyone but Blizzard can kill World of Warcraft, and I think they will even have trouble doing it. But it is fun, once you get the graphics issues worked out if your not playing on a top-of-the-line gaming rig. You've got to turn shadows off pretty much, not just on low, for the game to be mostly playable.

After that, the game is pretty good, even for those that aren't hardcore Star Wars fans. The storylines are good and the cinematic quest acceptance and turn-in movies are a nice little perk to watch. If you don't feel like watching all that, you can press the "space bar" and it will skip to the next choice you have to make.

Speaking of choices, most of your choices within the game have some sort of affect within the game. They can affect your relationship with your companions, which can affect the speed of their crafting skills (yes, you send your companions to do all of your crafting and gathering for you [gathering costs credits, though], the choices can affect points towards the light side or dark side of your character, which can in turn affect what types of weapons or crystal modifications you can use, or they can affect how NPCs react to you in the cinematics. All of this makes for a pretty custom scenario every time you play the game. For example, you could create two bounty hunters and play one as a completely nice, light-side bounty hunter (kind of an oxymoron, though) and play the other as the evil, hateful, dark-side and have two different experiences.

One more thing and I'll conclude for now (I could probably write alot more, but I'll save you the pain of reading through a long blog post). In SWTOR, the quest and rewaerds don't end after you turn it in, especially with side quests. Depending on how you completed certain quests, you may find mail from NPCs that you helped in the quest, which contain credits or gear, which is kind of nice. Alright, that's it for now. I'll see you next time.

-Ashton