Ryslin
3721
I remember running around back and forth quite a bit in KOTOR. All the running back and forth to make you look around strikes me as very bioware.
I think if you’re heal specced as a scoundrel or operative, you mostly/only get Upper Hand / Tactical Advantage from heals, not attacks.
My comments were meant in comparison to the other planets I played, even Coruscant, which has a comparable city-fragments layout.
Don’t even talk to me about Coruscant, the city of long corridors.
One thing Nar Shaddaa does have (in a few areas) is speeder bikes parked around the landscape that you can use for I think 2 minutes. Yes, you get knocked off if you’re attacked, but even so you have the chance to ride through an area if you are lucky or good.
Coruscant I just found that when I was done an area there was either an “exit” transport hub or else I didn’t have to backtrack very far. Partly by bad luck in my quest organization, perhaps, but also I think because of more “dead end” map design (Hi, Shadow Town) I did way more backtracking on NS. The only advantage it had over Coruscant for me was cooler looking transit routes. Neither the non-class content nor the backtracking did it any favours.
Nar Shaddaa may be “worse” (in some sort of abstract sense) than Coruscant but having to spend so much time on Coruscant at a low level negatively colored my view of leveling a Republic character.
I think the Empire leveling experience is better than the Republic one because Dromund Kass > Coruscant (in fact, I really like Dromund Kass, I think it has a lot of atmosphere), and because on the planet after that for Republic (Balmora? Taris?) about 90% of the mobs you kill are Rakghouls. Plus as I’ve said before, it feels more reasonable to me to be able to pick Light side responses while playing Empire as opposed to picking Dark side responses while playing Republic.
There are a lot of Rakghouls on Taris, but I liked it anyway. I wouldn’t argue with DK>Coruscant, but I still found Coruscant fairly fun. Nar Shaddaa I wanted to get the hell off of for two levels and I resented even having to fly back to spend my planetary commendations. And to reiterate a prior objection
Nar Shaddaa Republic quest spoiler
WTF, Evocii genocide quest, WTF. Tonally way off for a video game whether planets get blown up in this universe or not, and the LS/DS choice at the end is kind of fucked up either way.
Dejin
3728
There now appear to be planetary commendation vendors at the fleet star bases for all the various planetary commendations (at least there is as of the last build in the Imperial fleet base). So you won’t have to go back anymore.
Yep, they’re in the Republic fleet, too.
Yeah, I just checked out all the commendation vendors. And then I found the Light/Dark gear vendors, who sell orange (moddable) gear… right after I’d used up most of my extra commendations! However, I was able to get a pair of gloves, throw a mod I’d been carrying forever into it, buy a cheap mod off the auction house, and a couple-of-levels old mod from Nar Shaddaa commendations into it, making it better than the pair of gloves I had before. So I’m glad you guys mentioned that vendor in the Spacestation.
I love when the old canard about “the devs make timesinks to keep you online longer” gets trotted out. That may have been the case back in the Neverwinter on Compuserve days when you were charged by the hour, but has not been the case since at least UO.
The perfect customer is the customer that buys the box at launch, signs up for the monthly charge, and never plays the game. Every minute you are logged in, you are reducing the profit that the developers get from you. If you file 1 customer support ticket, you have eliminated the profit gained from your account for that month.
It isn’t quite as specious as all that because customers who never log in aren’t apt to remain subscribed. But I certainly doubt Nar Shaddaa is laid out that way because muahaha, the customers will have to play the game 30 minutes longer over the course of a subscription.
Mahrin Skel (when he was employed at Mythic) did a review of their customer data back in the day - he found that how much you played had literally no correlation to whether you would cancel or not. IE someone that logged in and played everyday was just as likely to cancel as someone who logged in once and never played again. This was back when DAoC was still on the upswing (IIRC). It might still be up on his blog, I’ll take a look later.
idrisz
3734
I know for sure for imperial, tatooine shop on the fleet sold different item than the merchant on the Tatooine planet.
Beta just ended. 11 days to early access; until then, that’s all she wrote.
Dejin
3736
This weekend I played an Imperial Agent up to about level 14, which got me through the starting planet out to poking around with some generic quests on the second planet and just a brief chance to do some of the class quest on the second planet.
I really, really liked the class story. If Bioware can manage to maintain that kind of quality throughout, I’ll be most pleased.
I know some people think that we’d all be better off if this had been a single player game. As someone who tends to spend most of their MMO time playing solo, I sympathize, however, I think the Imperial Agent highlights why we’re actually better off with an MMO.
If this had been a single player game we would have one story. That story would have almost certainly have focused on a Force User. Now instead we get to explore a much wider range of roles within the KotOR universe including what it means to be someone like Han Solo, what it would be like to be Commander Cody, what it would be like to be Boba Fett.
Also I feel that having entirely separate Republic and Empire stories leads to much more varied, more interesting moral choices – before the light-side path and dark-side path couldn’t be separated out that far, because it was one game which obviously had to share a lot of storyline, regardless of whether the player chose to play light or dark. As an Imperial Agent, I found it fascinating studying the Empire from the inside, exploring their system, something that almost certainly wouldn’t have happened in a Kotor3 (which presumably would have been written yet again from a Jedi/Republic starting standpoint, and could never have paths diverging far enough to have both a Jedi storyline and an internal “member of the Empire” viewpoint storyline).
I heard comments in beta that the retail version will have tiered PVP, instead of as it was in beta with everyone in one group (With its own kind of issues)
I am worried that this will down the line result in there being a severe shortage of players to pvp with in some brackets, since the game does not support x-realm pvp.
Since you basically need to pvp from the minute you reach level 10 until you are 50 to have any chance of getting the equipment at 50 I do hope you are able to get quickly into battlegrounds regardless of the hour of day, or what server you play on, but without x-realm that means that, a while after launch - depending on how endgame is and how many people make alts - you wont see any pvp in the early tiers, just like how Warhammer’s world pvp was dead in tier1-3 after a while.
Razgon
3738
Is the PVP gear dependant on how much you pvp then? Its separate gear I mean?
Not until you are level 50.
At 50 you could buy Champion, Battlemaster and something else gear, one of which required Valor rank 60.
At 20 I was valor rank 17 and had the level 20 PVP gear (With no PVP stats, so its good for PVE)… Since you get ‘scaled up’ when pvping, the gear didn’t really matter that much. I had maybe 1k more HP with the level 20 pvp gear, than I had with my assortment of level 11-15 equipment that I used before.
The Gear you can buy for PVP At level 20 is just the same as gear you can get anywhere else, from doing dungeons or just commendation rewards for doing the various “planets”.
Only difference is that for PVP You click the tiny “PVP Queue” button, whereas to get gear from Dungeons you need to use /WHO, /1, Wait, Group up, Walk to the instance, and clear it with a pug.
