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I've been wanting to play this MMO for ages, since I'd heard it's a very easy to play Bioware game with an interesting plot that you can easily treat as a single player game.

But the universe kept getting in my way, mostly in the form of network problems on my PC. And then a few days ago, I finally got to play it!

BRIEFLY. Just long enough to decide I liked it enough to pay for a subscription. And the universe LAUGHED IN MY FACE and TOOK IT AWAY >:( First my computer died, and then the game went down for maintenance, and then my computer died again, and then the weather was too hot to sit in that room all of a sudden...and then when all of that was dealt with, and I sat down to play...MY CHAIR COLLAPSED BENEATH ME.

I wasn't injured, thankfully, but I still sat on the floor for a while feeling very sorry for myself.

So now I am on my not-SWTOR-capable Mac laptop writing a dreamwidth post and feeling hard done by.

But from what I have seen, it's pretty fun. Very Bioware, for both good and ill.

The early parts that are all I've seen are ten years old, and feel like a mix of Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age Origins in terms of dated, muddy graphics and ~edgy writing that's not as clever as it thinks it is, but it's still fun space opera with some interesting writing and enough varied character choices that I'm having fun roleplaying. The one part that looks more modern is the UI, which reminded me of Final Fantasy 14 (which is otherwise a much prettier game). The combat is so easy thus far that it kind of doesn't matter, I just figured out a few skills I like and spam them. I've screwed up and died a fair few times, but never felt like any battle was beyond my capabilities.

The first 50 levels are taken up by one of eight totally different origin stories, 4 for Republic (jedi, bountyhunter, etc) and 4 for Empire (Sith, Imperial Agent, etc).

I started out playing the prettiest male bounty hunter the (rather blobby) character creator could make, but wasn't really into the knockoff Han Solo vibes, and a friend said the Empire side stories are all much better written and interesting morally complex, so I started again as a female Imperial Agent. In both cases I played as a sniper, since I always liked that in Mass Effect games, and I am liking it thus far in this, too.

Lucasarts wouldn't let Bioware add any gay until the first expansion, which is many levels away, but it turns out you can give female characters a beard which at least lets me feel visibly GNC.

I usually play my first character in a Bioware game as an earnest goody two-shoes, and wasn't sure how that would work as a space fascist, but it turns out I also enjoy playing an earnestly mission focussed person who isn't quite a sociopath but certainly doesn't feel especially bad about killing people. She does avoid it when she can, though, so I've been steadily gaining light side points, and am going to see if I can give her a redemption arc. Along which she will definitely fuck up and gain Regrets but that is the fun of a Bioware game!

She's a bit of a two-faced manipulative people pleaser, which has already led to having sex with one alien dude to avoid paying a debt. Which got me my first Light Side points, for not killing him. Since I hadn't gotten any before, I stared at the symbol thinking "Are there...sex points in this game??". Ah, Bioware.

My only companion so far is the female love interest for this route, Kaliyo, an edgy, impulsive mercenary who hates authority. I lost points with her for not sassing a Sith, trying to balance my character's desire to please Kaliyo with the self-preservation instinct to be a fascist boot-licker will be fun! She is very flirty in your first meeting, later on she assumes you're both into men but it's not hard to read her as kinda into you.

I feel a little weird about the whole...playing a fascist bootlicker thing, but the game clearly knows the Empire is evil, even while it portrays some specific individuals within it sympathetically. In some ways it's less uncomfortable than working for the Chantry in Dragon Age: Inquisition or for Cerberus in Mass Effect 2, where the game kept offering apologetics for why good people would work for these groups. Here it's clearly just...this organisation is run by evil fascists, doing evil things, and the only reason people put up with that is a mixture of brainwashing, selfishness, and fear.

Feels a little weird in Empire space seeing other players leaning into the whole WE'RE THE EMPIRE WOO aesthetic. I know that most people are just having fun with the ~evil aesthetic but there's possibly some Actual Pro Fascist types in the mix. Still, I wasn't planning on talking to other players anyway.

There's also a bunch of VERY UNCOMFORTABLE ~edgy slavery plots. Like, the writers expect you to be uncomfortable with slavery and want to help slaves, but it still feels pretty tawdry, like when I got Light Side points for not killing a bullying slavedriver but instead letting him off with a warning to be a nicer slavedriver.

It's also very male dominated and male gazey. My character feels like she was written as a man with the girl bits pasted in over the top, and in the bit of the bounty hunter plot I played, and the couple of hours of Imperial Agent, Kaliyo is literally the only named female character I can remember having met, and even the background female characters are mostly Sexy Dancing Female Tentacled Babes. There are no Sexy Dancing Male Tentacled Babes >:(

So yeah, a lot like playing a Mass Effect game! So far my character has managed to mostly balance not wanting to kill people unnecessarily with (loosely) obeying her imperial superiors but I don't think she'll be able to do that forever. Her supervisor already took her aside and told her to stop being so soft. When she said she Just Wants To Help The Empire and It's People (50% true, 50% what she thought he wanted to hear) he had this "Oh...we are going to chew you up and spit you out" tired look on his face.

I was having an ok time playing for free, but all the guides say that if you're going to subscribe you should do so as early as possible, even if just for one month, to unlock a bunch of stuff you get to keep even once the subscription lapses. And I was GOING to play solidly for a month and then see how I felt but we saw how THAT went >:(

I might have more to say later but I need to rest up before I have to go out frigging CHAIR SHOPPING.