Games | Superior Realities

The journey comes to a close. It may have taken around two years, but I have now completed all eight class stories in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Last but not least? Bounty hunter.

I didn’t put a whole lot of thought into the order in which I tackled the class stories. I mostly just went for whatever seemed interesting at any given time. However, as an Imperial loyalist, I did want my last class to be an Imperial, and that led to my Nova-inspired bounty hunter being the final one.

One last time:

Bounty hunter is neither the best nor the worst class story. It has a lot of great elements, but also a lot of rough patches and filler. It most reminds me of the Sith inquisitor story, in that it’s a plot that peaks very early, but its end doesn’t disappoint quite so badly as the inquisitor’s did, and some great characters help carry it through.

Chapter one is the highlight. The Great Hunt isn’t a particularly interesting premise on paper, but you have a good emotional investment in it via Mako and Braden (more on that later), and you encounter some very entertaining characters and situations along the way. It’s a good ride.

Chapter two, meanwhile, is pure filler in the truest sense of the term. It’s not interesting, and it doesn’t very little to advance the story. It’s just a waste of time.

Chapter three is more mixed, and to discuss that I need to back up a bit and examine the character of the bounty hunter themselves.

Something I’ve found frustrating from the outset is that Bioware clearly intends you to play your BH as a bloodthirsty sadistic thug. You can find more reasonable or diplomatic options, but even trying to play neutral, let alone good, is like navigating a minefield.

I’ve got no problem if people want to role-play their BH as psychopaths, but that wasn’t what I had in mind. I envisioned mine as a polished professional. A bit mercenary, a bit greedy (she is literally a mercenary after all), but not cruel or malicious. Just someone trying to make a living in a hard and unforgiving galaxy.

I won’t say it was impossible to achieve that, but it was harder than it should have been.

And it’s in chapter three this comes to a head. In chapter three, your character is a bad person. You don’t get a choice. There is no choosing the lesser of two evils. You just do awful, unpardonable things. Even the Sith classes almost always have the option to be kind and noble, but not the bounty hunter.

And that did not sit right with me. My BH was not a saint, but she wasn’t a monster, either. Not until the game made her one.

But then the ending turned it around. It’s hard to explain without spoiling things, but you do get your shot at redemption… or at least vengeance. It could have been handled better — I would have liked some opportunities along the way for my BH to express regret over what she’d been forced to do — but on the whole it proved a satisfying ending and at least somewhat absolved chapter three.

Speaking of characters…

The hunting party:

Bounty hunter is another class story where one of the companions ended up stealing the show for me. In this case, it’s Mako. I took an instant liking to her, and my appreciation only deepened with time. The fact she’s basically just Five from Dark Matter minus the blue hair probably contributes.

To me, Mako feels like the real main character of this story, especially early on. She has the emotional investment in the Great Hunt. She’s the one with a real arc, with real growth. The player BH just feels like a goon, whereas Mako is allowed to be a real person.

I quickly made it my head canon that Mako was the real brains of the operation, while my character was more the hired muscle. In every choice where Mako offered an opinion, I took her advice.

I have heard some people complain Mako is too soft to be a bounty hunter, and I kind of agree, but that’s what makes her an interesting character. She isn’t cut out for this life, but she doesn’t have much choice. This is all she’s ever known.

I was frustrated by how incomplete her story is, though. She has this great mystery building all through the game, and then it just ends without any answers or a clear conclusion. They must have meant to finish it post-launch, but then companions got abandoned until KotFE. Maybe they’ll finally finish her story if/when she gets reintroduced to the story.

Moving on from Mako, Gault is another great companion. Yeah, he’s a bit of a scumbag, but he’s just too much fun. He’s basically a dude version of Vette, and I’m very okay with that.

Unfortunately it’s all downhill from there on the companion front. First there’s ~~Torian~~ Snorian, who is the answer to the question, “What if drywall were a person?”

Then you get Blizz, an obnoxious cutesy mascot shoehorned into the class where an obnoxious cutesy mascot is most out of place, and Skadge, who is Tychus Findlay. Seriously, it’s the same voice actor, and essentially the same character. I didn’t like him in StarCraft, and I don’t like him here.

But at least your first two and most developed companions are awesome. That still averages to better luck on the companion front than some classes get.

As an aside, I tried something a little different with my companions’ appearances this time, as you may have noticed from the screenshots. Rather than giving everyone their own unique style, I tried to design all their outfits around a similar theme, a kind of uniform for the squad.

Of course Blizz kind of ruins it. Stupid space squirrel…

* * *

So bounty hunter won’t go down as my favourite class story, but it was a decent note to end on.

Stay tuned, though, as I will be doing at least one more post looking back on this entire journey.

The story of Warframe is an interesting one, and I think other game developers would be well-advised to study it. A smaller game from a relatively unknown studio, it’s clawed its way into the public spotlight with little more than a slow build-up of positive word of mouth.

That positive word of mouth was enough to finally convince me to give the game a shot. I’d long ignored it for any number of reasons that now seem silly (I think I somehow had it in my head it was a PvP game for a while there).

Before we go on, I’d like to note again that I’m not a big shooter fan. I don’t hate shooters — indeed, some of my all-time favourite games have been shooters — but all things being equal I prefer a good RPG or RTS.

Also, much like bhagpuss, I’m going through a phase of wanting to stick with more familiar games rather than chase the next big thing, and I decided to try Warframe more out of a sense of professional obligation than any genuine desire for something new. So I may have been predisposed to judge it more harshly than it deserves.

So keep all that in mind, but if I’m being honest, I greet Warframe with a hearty “meh.”

The trouble with shooters is that they all end up feeling kind of samey, at least to me. This whole post could just read “it’s pretty much like Destiny,” and that would tell you most everything you need to know.

Of course, there is the element of being able to switch between different warframes (the game’s equivalent of classes), but I didn’t get far enough in the game to have access to anything but my starting warframe (it’s never a great idea to put your game’s defining feature behind a grindwall).

Instead I need to look to more subtle elements that set the game apart. Like the fact the enemy AI is dumb as a bag of rocks (I’ve gotten stealth kills on enemies that were ten feet away and looking right at me), or the fact it has way too much loot, to the point where I seem to spend more time cracking open crates than doing anything else.

On the positive side, I do like that Warframe offers some weapon choices that are fairly unusual for a shooter. My arsenal consisted of a staff, throwing knives, and a bow.

Man, I loved that bow. Accurate, lethal, and with just enough arrow physics to grant verisimilitude without being too much of an inconvenience. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen a game come to capturing the beauty of archery in the real world.

The frustrating thing about playing as many MMOs as I have is that there’s always at least one feature in all of them I wish I could import to my preferred titles. It would be so amazing if archery in ESO felt like it does in Warframe.

Beyond that, the main things to set Warframe apart would be its setting and art style, both of which are rather… strange.

Warframe’s visuals — especially the warframes themselves — are certainly different, I’ll give it that. And I hesitate to be too harsh, because the world does need more games with unique art styles, and from an objective standpoint, I admire Warframe’s originality.

Subjectively speaking, though?

Dis game ugly.

I’m especially baffled by all the effort that’s spent on different ways to customize your warframe, none of which stop them from looking utterly bizarre and awkward. You can have any look you like, as long as you like being a technicolour robot space bug monster from a bad acid trip.

(To be fair, the Plains of Eidolon are gorgeous.)

As for the lore, it’s very much a game that throws you into the deep end and expects you to swim, which makes it a bit hard to judge from the small part I’ve seen.

It’s definitely a unique-feeling setting, and it’s clear that a lot of love and effort went into the world-building.

The trouble is the game doesn’t give you any reason to care. Your character is literally faceless and voiceless, so it’s very hard to get invested in them. Or anything else, for that matter. There are no characters to care about; there’s nothing to fight for.

So while I think Warframe’s lore could prove pretty interesting if you invest enough time in it, I lack the motivation to get that far.

And that’s about all there is to say. For all the negativity in this review, it’s a pretty solid game, and it plays well enough. But it’s just lacking any special spark to make me care.

But that’s fine. I needed another MMO to play like I needed a hole in the head. Maybe I’ll give Warframe another try if I ever really need something else to play. For now, it’s back to the old favourites.

Superior Realities

Category Archives: Games

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