Killed in a Smiling Accident.

In the land of the grind, the one-trick pony is king.

Applying the generic MMO philosophy to real life would mean that my boss asking me to write some code would inevitably result in me having to kill at least fifteen people or animals before the task was done.

Thankfully there is a distinct lack of wolves and boars hanging aimlessly around the office, but that pair of third floor accountants by the printer look as though they might aggro if I try to collect my hard copy.

I still find it interesting to consider ‘Why primarily combat?’ for a large number of MMOs. You may view that question in different ways depending on your prejudices, but it needn’t automatically be considered a failing of developers; indeed, many MMOs have tried other approaches without staggering success, so perhaps players have been seen to reject these alternatives. Again, though: why primarily combat?

Because combat provides an easy win condition? To satiate a fantasy which we cannot experience in real life? Because it is an easier system to encapsulate in lines of code than the alternatives? Because it’s a system which easily satisfies the input–>reward philosophy of gaming? Because we have yet to be offered alternatives which provide the exhilaration of the fight?

I’m not sure of the answer –or whether there even is an answer– otherwise this would have been the Revelation of the Day.

Badadadadada dum dum dum dadada daa daaa dum dum daaaaaaaaa! There’ve been literally some messages to the KiaSA team and not a single one of them demanded the return of Hat News Now Today, so we packed our correspondent off to some backwater of the galaxy and ignored him. Nevertheless he kept sending back holocrons for publication that were transported across the galaxy in the blink of an eye before sitting in a depot near Weston-super-Mare for a couple of weeks and finally turning up, squashed through the letterbox at the office with a ripped corner, so we thought we might as well run them.

This week we’re looking at the early-to-mid level headgear available to an Imperial Agent in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Our model, Agent Bowie-Numan, styled himself on early New Wave synth-rock, mid-period Ziggy Stardust, Ben Stiller in Zoolander, and finding a “complexion” option during character creation that looked like a touch of lip-gloss and some eye-liner. He apologises for some of the poor lighting conditions, as he was taking the pictures during a bit of downtime while infiltrating a rebel base and the flash would’ve been a bit of a giveaway.  On with the hats…

Check the bass out on these

Upon first glance the Chief Editor dismissed this initial submission out of hand, assuming Agent Bowie-Numan was simply flaunting the favoured accessory of sports stars and Cyberman impersonators, a set of Beats by Darth Dre headphones, and forwarded the shot to our sister team at Headphone and Earpiece Weekly. The Chief Sub-Editor vigorously disagreed, insisting that it was something worn on the head, and thus a hat. The Sub-Chief Editor angrily pointed out the lack of crown or brim, while the Sub-Chief Sub-Editor sided with the Chief Sub-Editor, plunging the office into the worst chaos and discord since The Great LotRO Tiara And Circlet Schism. A lengthy series of arbitration meetings concluded with the warring factions agreeing to rename “Hat News Now Today” to “Items Placed in a MMOG Head Slot News Now Today”, though nobody could find the Tipp-Ex to amend the headed stationery, and then it was lunchtime and everyone forgot about it due to a fierce debate over salted vs dry roast peanuts down the pub. As for the headgear itself, nobody was quite certain if the main purpose was to protect the jaw from quite specific attacks, to make talking more difficult, or to keep the ears warm.

I got a well nice hat down Camden, yeah?

Another piece vindicating the decision to move away from the strict “hat” focus. Not really an Agent item due to the stats, but appreciated by the panel for its pilot’s oxygen mask inspired styling, isn’t it? Isn’t it, though. Standard.

There'd better not be Ewoks

At last, an undisputed hat (or helmet) (some Venn diagramming may be needed.) Presumably an ancestor of the Scout trooper helmet, suitably Imperial, but could do with a bit of a face mask to be more ominous.

Maybe eye holes would've been a good idea

Agent Bowie-Numan spoke particularly highly of this piece, hoping it might lead to a guest spot playing a synthesiser with Orbital at Glastobury.

A touch of the Afrika Korps

Still with the jaw protection; could it be a design fault with the riding position on speeder bikes that caused a rash of troopers being hospitalised with badly bruised chins before new headgear was issued?

I sprint so fast I need a spoiler on my hat

Finally for this update, Imperial formal headwear, also known as “The original series Doctor Who Time Lord fancy dress hat”. Not strictly designed for combat, being a piece of social armour, but nonetheless tremendous fun to wear while adventuring just to see if NPCs can keep a straight face when giving you missions. So far the famed Imperial discipline is really holding up, as not a single person (or droid) has started a conversation with “What the hell have you got on your head?”

Creating my avatar in Star Trek Online as an Avatar, then hanging around in Ten Forward and watching Trekkies’ heads explode.

I mentioned in a previous post how pleased I was to see that I could instruct my companion in SWTOR to toddle off and sell all my junk loot in order to keep my limited inventory space clear for more important items, such as my fifteenth cosmetic neckerchief – this one will look simply darling in any medium-to-long range combat situation. Of course I imagine that Force users don’t instruct so much as persuade, in what is apparently the Jedi/Sith equivalent of sudo make me a sandwich. I mean, I’d make a rubbish Jedi, because the potential for Force abuse would be far too tempting to resist:

Companion: “But my favourite is green!”
Jedi [making a hand movement]: “Your favourite is yellow.”
Companion: “But my favourite is yellow!”
Jedi: “Well gosh, that *is* most conveniently handy, because that means you can have the yellow wine gums, and I’ll have all the green ones – which are my favourite.”
Companion: “Yay!”
Jedi [makes a subtle hand movement]
Companion: “Ow! Damnit!”
Jedi: “The phantom knicker-elastic snapper again?”
Companion: “It’s, like, every time we’re on the ship.”
Jedi: “It really is most perplexing.”
Companion: “And then there are all those draughts that keep lifting my dress. But we’re on a ship, Jedi! In the vacuum of space! IT’S A VACUUM!”
Jedi: “It is a *terrible* mystery. Truly it is. *monch* *monch* Mmmm, these green wine gums really are delicious.”

In my fresh play through of Skyrim as well, I quickly decided that I will skip the insane levels of inventory juggling and trips to the shops to sell my leftover loot, and instead I would only collect items which would really improve my character immediately, along with any gold coins I stumbled upon.

This is no revelation, just a simple hop skip and a jump along the natural progression of ‘loot leaving’ in an RPG. At first you leave no item unyoinked, twigs, bits of frayed string, fish bones, odd socks, cabbage leaves, cat hairballs, those waffle makers that everyone buys and only ever use once. Heck, it takes half an hour to progress a yard down the first path you encounter while you collect every piece of gravel along the way. After a while you make some money –because in EVERY RPG you start out with no money whatsoever– and you start to feel a little more flush, so that you only feel the need to, say, pick up every other Marmite jar. And you manage to pretty much leave the empty ones alone entirely! A little further in your progress down the Road of Single Player RPG, you find that the weapons and armour your opponents drop are hardly worth enough to warrant collecting, and you barely even look twice at old toenail clippings any more. Yet more time invested sees you leaving even some magical items, recoiling at the thought of having to break off from adventuring in order to traipse all the way back to town to sell them. And it’s not like you’re desperate for the gold now – a little more gold and you can probably buy that really nice castle down by the lake, with the hot tub and the billiard room. You know you’re over the hill of progression and coasting down the other side towards the retirement village of Dunitallnow upon Sea when you start to leave any item that isn’t a legendary artefact, and even then you have to think twice before popping the Holy Invincible Fist of the Almighty into you backpack in order to see if someone will give you some money for it; possibly enough to buy a new gold and diamond pull-chain for your en suite toilet back at the castle. In the end you reach the point where you’re so rich you just abandon cavernous rooms full of wondrous treasure, and when kings offer you dominion over entire regions of their kingdom, you sniff haughtily and give them such a look, as though they’d just rubbed themselves all over with dog poo and asked for a hug.

And yet, despite being so rich that I could buy the moon and still not have enough real estate to store all my worldly (and moonly) possessions, I *still* can’t walk past a blarmed wardrobe and dresser without having a peak inside, just in case. Just in case?! Just in case what? Just in case this mangled camphor box –inside a decrepit old woman’s rundown house– has, amongst the mouldy long knickers, scarves and the top half of a set of false teeth, the Inevitable Sword of Impossible Greatness? A weapon which could cleave the planet in twain and complete my dominion of time and space! Unlikely as that is, it might be hidden there, I’ll just have a peak… “ah no, it’s just some mouldy long knickers and a dusty long pink rubbery… is that a… ?! A…?! Aaaa…aaahhh! Oh, ugh, I think it is! Ewww! Ewww! I think I touched it!” And then I have to spend the next five minutes flapping around the place, holding my hands as far away from the rest of me as possible, while looking for some soap and running water. Such are the hazards of the ever-looting RPG adventurer.

But why this compulsion to look for that next improbably powerful item on the Fantasy Top 100 Items That Could Destroy A World? I mean, if it can cleave a world in twain, is that good? Can you cleave too much? Can you have too much cleavage? If it has a thirty six times direct damage modifier when cleaving, do I really need that? In RPG terms that would be 36DD Cleavage, and I’ve just no idea if I could even handle something of that magnitude.

In the end, I know who to blame: for, every time I get the urge to search for loot, the devil of temptation and the angel of abstinence are to be found, sat upon either shoulder, giving me advice. The devil whispers in my ear “Go on, loot it, looooot it; you know you want to”. A sweat breaks out on my brow, my hand hovers over the loot key, but with a wince I draw my hand sharply back as though the keys were brands which would burn ‘inveterate looter’ onto my finertips for all to see. I turn with great effort to the angel of abstinence who looks upon me with kind eyes full of understanding. Steepling her hands in front of her mouth, she looks thoughtful for a brief moment, and then shouts “For God’s sake man, what are you waiting for?! Loot the damn handbag, there could be some amazing treasure in there!”

Stupid angel of abstinence.

Like Melmoth I’ve been spinning the plates of MMOG hotbar combat in Star Wars: The Old Republic, though I’m not quite so tired of the whole business just yet. Doubtless burnout will kick in at some point, but for the moment I’m happy enough getting that crockery rotating. If character abilities are the “plates” in this analogy, though, my Welsh dresser is getting a bit crowded…

Maybe time to back away from the plate analogy. When I hit level 32 with my Imperial Agent and got a new skill, I didn’t have a space for it in any of the three hotbars on screen (plus a fourth with companion abilities). A bit of shunting and ditching a hotbarred consumable squeezed it in, but it’s getting to the point where I don’t really want too much more to think about during a fight.

I’m fine with the basics, the bread and butter stuff, or in a Sniper’s case the rifle and grenade stuff; bread and butter might be perfect specialisation options for a class centred around making sandwiches, but they’re not going to cut it against a horde of rakghouls. Unless you smear the floor with butter to make them fall over, then bludgeon them to death with an especially crusty baguette, that might work. Anyway, the basics are fine, get into cover, shoot enemy with gun, pew and indeed pew. It’s the assortment of situational skills that are more the issue. To return to the kitchenware, some abilities are a bit like a melon baller, fish kettle or set of specialist cheese knives; useful in quite specific circumstances but the rest of the time they clutter the place up, and when you really need them you either forget you have them entirely or spend half an hour rooting through cupboards shouting “Darling! Have you seen the Tête de Moine scraper? The Tête de Moine scraper! You know, the… No, no, it’s not in that draw, I’ve emptied it all over the floor already (by the way you might want to watch you don’t tread on a lobster pick when you come through)… Over the microwave? No, I’ve looked in… no, no, you’re thinking of the Parmesan frisker… yes, the thing behind the spinach shredder, definitely Parmesan… well I suppose I could just use a lemon zester, but… Oh, cock, I’ve been shot by a Smuggler.”

SWTOR is of course not alone in its plethora of skills, it’s something I posted about when playing WAR as a Bright Wizard for example. It avoids some issues of situational skills by blurring the boundaries between solo and group play through companions (as Tobold and others have noted), so you don’t have important group skills such as taunts or a “heal other” ability that are completely useless when solo. Spinks also has a fine post about the way the game ramps up the difficulty to introduce certain abilities and concepts; at the end of Chapter One I was having terrible trouble with a boss who marmalised me before I could even get him near half health. A quick glance at the forums revealed I wasn’t the only one, and that the key to the fight was interrupting incoming attacks using a skill that had been gathering dust next to the grapefruit spoons. It wasn’t the first encounter involving an opponent with a charge-up ability, there’d been previous fights where mobs had annoying wind-up attacks, but as it wasn’t essential to interrupt them I’d just been bulling through with the usual attack spam and recovering afterwards. As it turned out there was a Plan B for the boss, on returning to the game after checking strategy tips I noticed a colleague log on, who was kind enough to tag along for a hot Darth-on-Darth force-choke-off, but having been reminded of the interrupt skills I’ve actually been using them more in general play (when I remember).

Solo, or in a small friendly group, re-adjusting is usually quite straightforward; a group of us were in a Flashpoint and had wiped once or twice using the patent pending “use random attacks on random mobs!11!” technique so we paused, started marking targets and using crowd control (partially via the “Slice Droid” skill I’d been generally neglecting in favour of a potato ricer), and sailed through the rest of it. It’s PvP that’s most problematic, as warzones offer few opportunities for quiet contemplation of optimal skill use. I’ve been rather enjoying PvP for the most part, and doing well enough I think, but there’s often a nagging sensation (typically after respawning) that I overlooked something, like the 3 second Evasion boost “panic button” skill that I’m always panicking too much to find when I really need it.

As with so many things it’s an impossible balance for developers. Players want sufficient options to make combat challenging and interesting but for each player that’s a slightly different point on the continuum with the two-button phase at one end, and at the other 17 hotbars packed with skills like “Rotating Thrust-o-matic: does 363 damage over X seconds, where X is the inverse square of the range from the player to target, to a non-human target with more than 17% but less than 64% health whose name includes an equal number of vowels and consonants”. There’s also the development and reward aspect of gaining new abilities, always a cornerstone of RPGs; even with hotbars are stuffed to bursting it’s a bit disappointing to turn up to a trainer after levelling and only getting a new rank of an existing ability. A new skill rank is the level-up equivalent of socks for Christmas; you bound downstairs to the tree, grab a present, what could it be? A new bike? A football? An attack that does massive AoE damage and incapacitates all targets for ten minutes that’s also a self-heal? That AT-AT toy with motorised walking action you’d been dropping subtle hints about (“THAT ONE! I WANT THAT ONE! I’VE DRAWN A BIG CIRCLE AROUND IT IN THE ARGOS CATALOGUE WITH A FELT-TIP!”)? In hindsight the fact that the parcel was sock-sized and squishy should’ve ruled out the more ambitious guesses, but nevertheless it’s hard to muster fake enthusiasm when tearing off the paper reveals a grey nylon pair of “Shoot Enemy With Gun: Rank 3″.

If you’ve had your character planned down to the last detail since pre-launch, I guess that’s the equivalent of knowing what you’ll be getting for the next 50 Christmases, quite appropriate for a Sith (insert obligatory “felt your presents” gag…)

At the end of the day I suppose you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and then beating the eggs with a guive-guive-guisarme-eggwhisk. I’m sure I had one around here somewhere…

Just a quick message to say that we here at KiaSA would like to express our full support today for our fellow Internet comrades in wanting to stop SOAP. SOAP has been around in the world for far too long, oppressing and restricting the olfactory freedom of the populace. Gamers, especially, have long bucked the trend against SOAP, and it’s about time that the rest of the world woke up and smelt the ro…

Do what now?

Really?

Well what the hell is SOPA?!

I can’t even look it up on Wikipeda today because of SOP… oh, there’s probably some irony in there somewhere.

Sorry everyone, as you were.

So my time with Star Wars: The Old Republic is coming to an end. There’s no real surprise in this for me: I wasn’t going to buy SWTOR initially, but the breathless blog banter lauding its already much vaunted fourth pillar of storytelling had convinced me that, for the price of the box, it’d be worth a look whether I chose to subscribe to the game afterwards or not. The fact that m’colleague and other friends were also intending to play, however, added much needed girders of reinforcement to the somewhat shaky foundations of my decision, and thus I quickly cemented the whole deal with an order, before the building inspector of common sense could review the plan and tell me that it would never stand the test of time.

Based upon the standard indicators of ‘time played’ and ‘entertainment had’, I certainly got enough out of the game to justify the box price; compared to many games I’ve bought recently, I’d say that SWTOR settled towards the happy end of the value for money scale. Only games such as Dragon Age (89 hours played) and Skyrim (128 hours played, and counting…) can make any sort of impact on the ‘value for money’ assessment, and really those two should be treated as freakish outliers of my recent game time investment.

I have enjoyed my time in SWTOR, but while the story element is certainly entertaining, in wrestling for my continued commitment to the game, it simply wasn’t differentiating enough to be able to overpower and suplex the plodding linear progression and constricting nature which is typical of this type of MMO. This is not a failing of SWTOR – for many this is still as perfectly enjoyable and entertaining as it always was, and for those people SWTOR is surely a fast flowing stream of fresh IP into the rather stagnant pond of fantasy MMOs. My tastes have definitely changed, however; be it through burnout, or having discovered pastures which are richer grazing, better suited to my game-play appetite, I struggle now to find any pleasure in on-rails grind, as well as the hotbar combat, common to MMOs of this sort.

The simple fact is that I like to look into the world when I play a game of this sort, for if it is not –to a greater extent– about the world in which our characters inhabit, why have the world at all? We could easily write games where the player is required to stare at a number of little coloured icons, and press them in optimal order based upon the variable cooldown counters which tick above them, and simulate pretty much everything there is to MMO combat, without the need for a game world. Even UI addons which move these elements of buffs, debuffs and hotbar abilities into the middle of the screen do not alleviate the simple fact that the player’s attention must be, for a disproportionate amount of play time, concentrated on these tiny little UI elements, rather than the world around them. The perceived increase in difficulty of tanking, and to a lesser extent healing, in these games stems from the fact that the situational awareness and positioning that these roles require runs counter to the entire rest of the combat design – to stare at tiny little icons and press them when cooldowns allow, when debuffs require, or when priority demands. The entire combat design of these games, which has barely changed from generation to generation, is akin to a person in a pit spinning a comfortable number of plates on the end of broom handles, and where every now and again an angry wolverine is thrown in such that the plate spinner has to try to frantically beat it away with a spare broom handle while still trying to keep the plates spinning.

In Skyrim I have to watch where my enemy is in the world. If the enemy is close, I try to hit him with a big sword. Sometimes the enemy will try to hit me with a big sword, and in this case I have to watch for him swinging at me, at which point I block the attack. After one hundred and twenty eight hours or so of playing, this is still fantastically entertaining to me. I do not have to look down at a UI element and see if my sword is off global cooldown. I do not have to look at another, different, UI element to see if my shield is off its five minute emergency cooldown. I do not have to juggle a number of short duration buffs which, if they drop, will mean the almost guaranteed defeat of my character. The cooldown on weapons is, to some extent, reflected in the length of time it takes to swing them: two-handers feel slow and ponderous compared to their one-hander cousins, but this simply serves to add solidity and texture to the combat, while building in a suitable restraining mechanic to the more potent damage range of the various two-handed weapons. There are no plates to juggle in Skyrim’s game-play, just one big plate, which I must smash over the head of my enemy; this is what I need in a fantasy game, not taking a sixty second ‘day’ and organising my hotbar meeting schedules into this time period.

“Well I’ve got an armour buff telecon in fifteen seconds, maybe we could reconvene the channelled ranged attack best practise seminar until after then; hmmm, but that does leave me with a short window where we could probably leverage a quick value-added primary attack GCD, which would be win-win if we can then schedule for the thirty second self-heal strategic planning afterwards. Of course, we’ll have to be proactive if an off-GCD defeat response occurs in the meantime – we’ll fast track it and bump the rest of the day’s schedule if that happens. I’ll get my people to macro your people. Okay, ciao.”

I could not program an Excel spreadsheet to play my Skyrim character effectively.

That’s the feeling I can’t shake with many of these hotbar-based MMOs – that an Excel spreadsheet could probably be doing it better. The realisation hits that a spreadsheet program should be my gaming idol, that at the next PAX I may well witness an Excel box surrounded by the flickering flashlight of photographers while two scantily clad women lean in from each side, one leg kicked out saucily behind each of them, planting kisses on the sides of this perfect specimen of hardcore MMO player. And then there’ll be the stupid puns in magazine articles, such as How to Excel at MMO Gaming.

Again, I have nothing against SWTOR as a game, I’ve just come to an even more firm conclusion that MMOs “where you play combat primarily in the user interface rather than the game world” are not for me. Which is rather a shame, because that’s most of them, by my current calculations. I’ll be interested to see if games such as TERA have actually made an action-orientated MMO, or whether it’s the same old concession to hotbar plate juggling, only now the rabid wolverine is a permanent fixture; in which case I can’t imagine it will fair terribly well (the game that is, not the wolverine, who I’m sure will have a whale of a time). I’m also somewhat less sure about Guild Wars 2, because on the one hand the game has a vastly restricted hotbar space, such that there are far fewer plates to keep spinning, but on the other hand the hotbar is still there, and I’m just not sure that you can realistically expect to have a hotbar and a true action RPG occupying the same game client.

In the meantime I’ve rolled a new character in Skyrim; having finished the main story and vast swathes of the game, I now want to go exploring with a slightly less accomplished (read: overpowered) character, and discover all the places that my boss keeps telling me about from his play through, but which I’ve yet to discover. I went for my favourite character type the first time around, a female paladin sort, wearing heavy armour, wielding a sword and shield, and well versed in the arts of healing magic. It was tremendous fun, but now I’m going to play an orc barbarian, with a big two-handed axe, and wearing only light armour; I’m going to see if it’s possible to play an in-your-face melee character without relying on heavy armour or healing magic. I’m also happily taking a leaf out of SWTOR’s book and eschewing the quick save option in all but the most game-breaking cases. This has already lead to interesting developments, where, in the first town at which I arrived, my character accidentally (no, really!) stole something from the bar of an inn and –in self defence, Your Honour– killed the innkeeper when he attacked over the inadvertent indiscretion. As a result of which I quickly fled the town, with the grubby wooden plate I had stolen as a somewhat disappointing trophy of this early exploit in my adventuring career. An intriguing, if ignominious, beginning.

I’ll see you all in another hundred and twenty eight hours.

According to a developer blog, in Star Wars: The Old Republic “The Imperial Agent is an expert at infiltration, seduction and assassination”; a bit of a Space James Bond. In fact playing an Agent reminds me somewhat of Alpha Protocol where dialogue trees typically had three choices: Aggressive, Suave or Professional, broadly equated to Jack Bauer, James Bond or Jason Bourne. SWTOR doesn’t explicitly tag things that way, but there are certainly elements of those three in the choices you can make, from extreme ruthlessness to raised eyebrow insouciance. For the “seduction” part of your brief sometimes there are conversation options specifically labelled “[FLIRT]“, and if one turns up I can’t help but select it to see the result, regardless of who I’m talking to; other members of Imperial Intelligence, Sith Lords, defecting rebel fighters, nobles, Hutts, Jawas, attractive looking vegetation, I’ll flirt with anything. At the risk of delving into deep psychoanalysis and uncovering mother issues, I think there are both in-game and meta-game reasons.

Character-wise, as a representative of the Sith Empire there’s a fairly relaxed moral code. I don’t know if Imperial Intelligence hold Sexual Harassment in the Workplace seminars, but if they do they’re probably a bit different to contemporary versions. “Hey, Darth Corporate-Video-Actor! Are you about to use your Force powers to abuse a slave? STOP! Think about it. There’s something wrong, isn’t there? That’s right, you haven’t set up a HoloCam to record the incident to upload to Sith Lords Do The Funniest Things.” I generally pick light side options when confronted with major moral choices, but for the most part gallivant around the place as an irreverent space womaniser.

In game mechanic terms, conversation choices don’t tend to have deep or long term implications. I could be entirely mistaken, but I haven’t seen any opportunities to deviate from the linear story quests so far; I can detour via space combat, PvP, crafting or what-not, even ignore the story altogether, but if I want to take part I go where I’m sent, and do what I’m told. Course single player story-driven games also tend to railroad you in something of an inverse butterfly effect, but MMOGs have additional issues, such as the absence of a save game. Melmoth linked to the Penny Arcade quote about reaching for the quick save button leading to some contemplation in the comments of irreversible consequences, something Pirates of the Burning Sea made me think about last year. Moridir points out in previous comments that you can reset a conversation using the Escape key to remake lightside/darkside/affection choices, a sort of pseudo-quickload, worth bearing in mind if you really don’t like the way something turns out, but possibly not entirely reliable. In a single player game I might try my luck with a Sith Lord safe in the knowledge that I have a save game to fall back on should she reject my advances (with hilarious, or fatal, or indeed hilariously fatal consequences); in SWTOR I rely on Bioware not wanting to face the wrath of a million forum posts that would doubtless result if your future was seriously effected by a conversation option not clearly labelled “[FLIRT] [ALSO GET FORCE-CHOKED TO DEATH DUE TO A SERIOUSLY MISJUDGED CHAT-UP LINE]“.

That’s not to say my amorous attempts have been universally positive. There was one minor incident of ill-advised flirting involving a fanatical assassin, a top of the line holo-disguise and a dagger to the kidneys that would’ve definitely needed a quickload in a single player game, but an Imperial Med-Bot got me through it. I was a bit disappointed not to have got in a snappy Space James Bond zinger before the combat started, though, something like “Argh! That’s not quite what I meant when I suggested a game of ‘hide the vibro-knife’…”

You know you’ve been playing a certain MMO too much when you walk past a door labelled ‘Project Room’ at work first thing in the morning, and your fuzzy mind interprets it as a project room.

I wonder if the Jedi have project rooms? Huge rooms with padded walls, full of oversize bean bags, enormous soft toys, and giant cushions, which the warrior monks can fling at one another with impunity. I always wondered why the Jedi Council looked so ruffled and out of breath every time they spoke to Anakin and Obi-Wan. If you watch closely during The Phantom Menace you can even see Mace Windu trying to discreetly hide a teddy bear that got lodged in the hood of his robes.

And pillow fights at Jedi pyjama parties suddenly take on a new and exciting outlook.

I’ve finally reached the halfway mark of the Old Republic marathon, where professional MMO athletes long ago reached the end, and have since received their silver foil blanket, had a drink and a biscuit, gotten changed, gone home, had a bath, flumped themselves down onto the sofa and are happily watching television with a glass of red in hand. Yet I’m still running plod-footed and heaving breathlessly around the track. Indeed, I’m not even one of your average MMO athletes: most people in the casual guild I joined having put twenty levels on me before I’d even had a chance to log in for the first time. I’ve come to the conclusion that I must be, somewhat appropriately, one of those comedy MMO runners who undertakes the trial with a wry sense of occasion, light of heart and purpose, and running the whole thing backwards while dressed in a giant chicken suit.

Like the marathon runners, we race along these paths, through landscapes and cityscapes of majesty and beauty, but always staying true to the well trod, well defined path. Barriers line the runners’ route, broken infrequently by refreshment stations where NCPs stand and offer bottles of XP to revitalise and give energy to our enthusiasm as we trudge ever onward. The goal is clear, the path is planned and set, the location is irrelevant – merely a change of scenery. The scenery in Star Wars: The Old Republic is both stunning and heartbreaking, because I look upon it and marvel, the bright sun of stupefaction shining from my wide eyes and smile. Yet how quickly the sunset of realisation falls across my face, my features dark as I realise that most of what I observe I can never explore. We players are still funnelled, as though running on a treadmill while an artificial world is rotated past, in order to give the illusion of movement and progress.

To cheer myself up, I went and bought my Bounty Hunter her mobility scooter which is available to characters from level twenty five. I think they have fancier names for them in the Star Wars universe, hoverbike I believe to be the formal term, with imposing monikers such as the Gurian Hammer or the Rendili Fireball, but I can’t help but see them as a sort of floating Zimmer frame for the infirm, or a slowly sliding Segway which I expect players to have about an equal amount of success in controlling. They are faster than running –I know this because Torhead knows this; for SWTOR is an MMO, and thus statistical proof trumps all– but the basic ones bumble along in such a manner that there must be a serious temptation to get off and push. Indeed, I still fully expect to see some more adventurous sort overtake me on an untethered Mandalorian washing machine at full spin cycle, vibrating it’s way along in a random path which still somehow manages to run circles around my hovering industrial floor scrubber. Still, my character has reached middle age, and as such it’s nice to get a mobility boost; I might pick up one of those nice Corellian cybernetic hearing aids for my character’s ear slot at some point too, they seem all the rage with dark lords of the Sith this season.

I do have trouble picturing some of these vehicles being used in the Star Wars films, and indeed perhaps we don’t see them because in the intervening time period the companies who produce them have gone out of business, and for good reason. Try picturing Han Solo and Chewbacca thrumming down the corridors of the Death Star on one of these, as they try to escape from an angry flock of storm troopers, and it doesn’t quite work; consider if the storm troopers were all stacked onto one themselves in Keystone Kops fashion, flailing around trying to maintain their balance as they race down the corridor at some frightening speed approaching that of a brisk walk; the corridors of the Death Star weren’t as wide as they were in the space stations of The Old Republic, and I expect the chase scene would end with them very gradually negotiating a corner before slowly and inexorably losing control and bumping into a wall. At somewhere around walking pace. Over a period of several minutes. After which everyone disembarks and carries the chase onwards on foot; several minutes later, we cut back to the abandoned hoverbike, where it finally decides the impact was too much and explodes in a huge fireball.

Of course being on the side of the ‘evil’ Empire it costs a player some forty thousand credits to obtain one of these hobbled jet skis, or hover pedalos, an amount which is the majority of savings for a level twenty five character who has spent frugally and chosen not to exploit the lucrative joys of Splicing. I expect the Republic have a much better health care system, and thus their war veterans get a mobility scooter for free. In contrast I stole my starship, and it only costs me seventy five credits to fly the thing from one sector of the galaxy to another, so I’m half tempted just to take that instead, crashing it into the living rooms of unsuspecting NPCs, then leaning out of the cockpit window and asking through the haze of smoke and sprinkler spray if they have any mundane life issues that they’d like a complete stranger to solve for them. Lost your cat, you say? I’ll get right onto that! Now when did you last see it? About two minutes ago, I see. And where did you last see it? Somewhere in the vicinity of the fiery rubble where my smoking sparking starship is now resting? I… seeeee… LOOK, OVER THERE! [activates jump to light speed]

I have to wonder what they use to power these hoverbikes too. I looked at the mini jet turbines attached to the sides and concluded that they were merely for show, that a vehicle this slow cannot possibly be jet-powered, and that they are, in fact, the Star Wars equivalent of Pimp My Ride’s car bling. It’s like the common ritual of young men in developed nations the world over, who at the coming of age, buy a really cheap old wreck of a car, and then stick glowing lights, stripes and bits of tinsel to it, in order to attract a mate, much like those birds who build a fancy nest out of the feathers and fur of other animals. Thinking about it, I’ve yet to see a Vauxhall Nova with feathers and a bearskin rug taped to the outside, perhaps that’s why these pimply youths struggle so much to find a partner?

Anyway! The thought of a cybernetically enhanced Sith, with bionic legs and superhuman speed on tap via The Force, pootling around on one of these scooters is, while terribly amusing, somewhat out of sorts with what I perceive as the Star Wars ethos. So I had to come up with another reason to justify it to my constantly questioning and insatiable mind, and the power source became the focus of my attentions. With jet power ruled out (through the medium of a harsh sharp laugh and a best-of-British disbelieving raised eyebrow) I considered what the power source might be. At first I imagined battery power was most likely, with the scooter doubling-up as a convenient charging station for the life-preserving functions of the Sith’s cybernetic battlesuit, as well as their iPod. However, on considering the bizarre shape and size of these hovering hand barrows, I realised that there was probably enough room within the extensive bodywork to house a small being. It soon dawned on me that these things are most likely pedal-powered. It made so much sense: the asthmatic speed; the slightly bumbling doddery nature of locomotion; the wheezing and panting and squeaking of cogs that they emit as they glide by. But who? Who could the Sith get to power such a device? For surely the life of such a being would be unforgiving and short and full of suffering – which would certainly explain why a Sith would deign to use one, enjoy it, in fact. I investigated further, dug into the depths of the Sith archives and found nothing; took a look in the user manual, whereupon I discovered the sickening disclaimer on page 147 in the section titled How To Replace Your Hoverbike’s Power Source:

“Many Bothans die to bring you this transportation.”