Aesthetically Pleasing SWTOR Update

In the patch this week for SWTOR, 1.2, a very exciting option was added. At least for me. Armour color scheme unification! Basically it lets you unify the colors of your armor pieces to that of your chest piece. It also lets you toggle the visibility of your helmet (which is good because mine’s ugly and I really like the hairstyle I picked for Cith). Here’s a nice little before and after pick of Cithryth getting her clothes unified.

It’s also nice because you can uncheck certain pieces of armor if you don’t want them unified. Handy if you think the un-unified color looks better with the outfit. SWTOR is still a long way off from LOTRO’s oufitting system, but even little advances like this are good. And I certainly remember back in the day when LOTRO didn’t have any cosmetic system. Dark days, those. But now look at them! Maybe SWTOR will take a hint from LOTRO and see how much people love playing with cosmetic outfits. And certainly there’s a precedent in Star Wars lore for pretty outfits, look at Padme Amidalla for crying out loud!

Anyway. Another exciting addition in 1.2 is interface editing. Here’s what the editor looks like:

The color codedness is very helpful, as is the ability to specifically select certain kinds of UI elements (like vitals, quickbars, etc) to specifically look at. You can save the interface you create and use it on other characters and even upload it somewhere so people can try out your interface. It’s much cleaner than LOTRO’s method of this, which requires chat commands to save and load UI layouts. The graphical interface approach is much cleaner and easier to understand in my opinion. Also, yay target of target is available!

Here’s my interface at the moment. You can compare it to the screen I posted in my last entry with the default UI layout.

Last night I played quite a bit with Nav and two of our friends. We did a couple of the 4 person Heroics in Balmorra and it was quite fun. We’re all around lvl 20/21 now and I’m moving on to Nar Shadaa. We also finally started our guild, Muppet Labs. It’s Muppet Labs because that is the name of all the servers/groups that Nav and his workmates own.

Yesterday I also spent quite a bit of time on Warzones. I love them! When I had tried them earlier, all I got was Hutt Ball which for me is not very fun. But I never got Hutt Ball once yesterday. Did a lot of Novare Coast, Alderaan and Voidstar. All fun. They remind me of the Warhammer Online PvP Scenarios, which behaved in pretty much the same way. You queue up, go about your business, then when it’s ready you get a notification.

It took me a bit of getting use to using sniper in PvP. At first I thought maybe this class wasn’t too good at PvP, but then I thought that couldn’t be true so I just tried out different tactics til I got better. Now I’m pretty good. Well, at least I can hold my own anyway.

I’ve also added a page at the top of this blog that has the portraits of all my SWTOR characters. Right now, Cithryth is lvl 21, City is lvl 5, Citi’lai is lvl 4, Herefara is lvl 1 and Sriracha is lvl 1. They’ll all get leveled up one day!

New Addiction – Star Wars: The Old Republic

This Easter weekend, SWTOR was having a free trial weekend. Since Nav and all our friends had a 4 day weekend, we decided to all try it out. And by the end of the weekend we had all bought it.

I really don’t think I would have gotten so addicted without friends to play with. It’s a pretty good game, but not great or anything. Xhii from Roll One Hundred expresses similar sentiments. It’s a pretty new game, so I give it the benefit of the doubt for the most part. But as she says, it is definitely lacking some basic things. Hopefully with time they will get added.

I was the only one in our group to want to go Jedi I guess so we went Sith instead. Luckily with the way quests work, you can be a ‘good’ person despite being on the Sith side. Quests in SWTOR don’t work the same way they do in LOTRO or other MMOs I suppose. In SWTOR, every quest pick up and hand-in comes with a cutscene of dialogue between you and the quest giver. You can choose between a few kind of replies to give to the various things the questgivers say. You can be rude, you can be kind, you can be whatever. You really can shape the personality of your character more than just “do this quest” or “don’t do this quest”.

SWTOR Cithryth exists on the Asia/Pacific PvP server (there’s only one… so whatever that server is called, that’s where I am). She’s an Imperial Agent, which I guess I would describe as a cross between a LOTRO burglar and a witch-hunter from Warhammer Online. At level 10 you choose one of two ‘advanced class’ paths. I chose to go sniper – so more long-range damage type stuff. So far I’m only level 17 but it’s been real fun so far.

In case anyone is wondering, this is what the UI looks like. There’s no way to re-arrange stuff at the moment, but apparently the patch that is coming out this week (supposedly), 1.2, will allow you to rearrange UI elements. Yay!

You also get various ‘companions’ – basically like skirmish soldiers or pets in LOTRO. They can follow you around and help you fight, sell stuff for you and even do crafting quests. As an Imperial Agent, I don’t really like my first companion, Kaliyo. She’s creepy.