I really like Electric Light Orchestra so I listen to them fairly regularly. The last album I listened to was “Out of the Blue”. It’s not my favorite ELO album (that would have to go to Eldorado), but it definitely has so many good songs on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsT4rwbOb0E
A lot of people have been criticizing the ideas behind TLJ, but I actually really disagree on that point.
I think it’s great to bring different perspectives on established ideas in media. I especially love it when the series is self-aware enough to do it on its own. Theoretically having a character be critical of the Jedi and in the end reject their ways is a great idea that allows the world to be even more fleshed out and feel more real to the viewer.
This is going to get off topic, but I believe this post will put into perspective my issues with The Last Jedi so bear with me.
My absolute favorite Star Trek series is Deep Space Nine. It takes a very critical look at the Federation and the optimistic future set up by Gene Roddenberry since the very first series and tests these ideas in the show repeatedly with a war they can’t simply talk their way out of, inner conflict in the Federation, and more space-political drama. I really admire what they did with the show because I never felt that it was fairly respectful of Roddenberry’s vision and in the end I believe the Federation stood up to these various tests. It allowed a fresh look at an existing world with a new and diverse set of characters including one old one. Very admirable in my opinion.
My favorite Star Wars media outside of the main film series is Knight of the Old Republic 2 as some of you might have guessed by my avatar. It builds off of Knights of the Old Republic’s fairly usual Star Wars story and gives it some depth with a different perspective on the Mandalorian Wars and Darth Revan. One of the companion’s views of the Force, the Jedi, and the Sith are incredibly critical with some reasonable explanation as to why she felt that way. It was really fantastic and I felt that even though the game is unfinished, the goal of the writers and the way they pulled it off was so admirable that I couldn’t help but fall in love with the story.
Now really why did these series work, but The Last Jedi didn’t work for me? In the end, I feel it really boils down to execution. The Last Jedi using existing characters like Luke to criticize the Jedi way really didn’t work out for me. KotOR 2 and Deep Space Nine both brought on new characters to provide another perspective on the world. I felt that in the end, Kylo Ren could have been much more suited for that critical outlook on established Star Wars ideas like the Jedi and the Sith instead of Luke. Particularly towards the end where he gives that speech about wanting Luke, Snoke, the Jedi, and the Sith to all die. I felt that Luke should have been the grounding Star Wars character in that movie, a familiar character that tests Kylo Ren’s ideas. They went a completely different direction with Luke’s character though, to the point where I was taken out of the movie because I adamantly believe that most of what Luke did in that movie was out of character. The ending scene with Kylo Ren and Luke together kind of did this for me, but I was still taken out of it due to how Luke was previously characterized in the movie.
I also believe that everything involving Finn, Poe, Rose, and Holdo would have worked much better if there was a spy relaying their hyperspace jumps to the First Order instead of them being able to track them through lightspeed. That was my first thought when I was watching the movie and was why I thought Holdo was withholding her plan until they found the spy. I feel like that sequence of events would have been better for Finn’s character progression and Poe’s while making Holdo a much more agreeable character to the audience. It would have been interesting to have a feeling of mistrust among the Resistance, maybe even mainly directed at Finn who was a former First Order soldi- I mean janitor.
So yeah I feel the movie was really wasted potential along with being a bad movie that didn’t manage to get its themes across well due to poor execution. Also the excess of humor definitely detracted from the ideas that movie was trying to present. And I think some people have pointed out that the originals definitely had their fair share of humor too, but I always felt that it was naturally presented in the story and didn’t detract from the tone the movies were going for. Well, except with the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi.
I actually liked Hux a fair bit because in The Last Jedi it was clear he was the most stable in the First Order which was kind of hilarious to me.
PewDiePie? Really?
The lad who did this - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/11/pewdiepie-racism-youtube-games-industry & http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-41222593
and in the first line of his video you linked to says, after mocking the hype re the new Star Wars film, ‘I’m not that big of a Star Wars fan’.
Nandi, if you’re going to post a video or review here etc then add some info and context to it - it’ll help members make a decision as to whether they wish to click on it before doing so.
Do not just post a link.
What does him saying the n-word have to do with anything lol
Given the lad’s history why shouldn’t it be said his opinion may not hold much weight?
Also in the context of ‘I’m not that big of a Star Wars fan’ too.
‘lol’? Really?
I’m not arguing his opinion isn’t absolutely worthless. I’m just asking why would him saying the n-word make his opinion more worthless? One of my best friends is racist towards hispanic people, but I’m not going to start throwing his opinions out the door on other matters regardless of how stupid his feelings are on one matter.
Did you click on the links and read them? Likely not - as if you did you’d realise it’s not just ‘the n-word’, is it? And also what the gist of the Guardian article is about too, yes?
And I didn’t say anything about using ‘the n-word’ making his opinion more worthless. You seemingly assumed that.
Also, again, in the context of ‘I’m not that big of a Star Wars fan’ too.
Anyway, back on topic…
I read the Guardian link which to my knowledge doesn’t talk about anything else aside from his usage of the n-word during a livestream. And while you didn’t mention anything about his previous actions making his opinion more worthless in your original reply (merely assumed as I didn’t understand the point of the post), it is something you actually did say in your reply to me unless “Given the lad’s history why shouldn’t it be said his opinion may not hold much weight?” means something else which then I stand corrected.
I just don’t understand why you’re criticizing his decision to post a Star Wars The Last Jedi review in a Star Wars The Last Jedi review thread. I’m about halfway through the review and I really don’t see anything harmful about this review so I’m not sure why context would be needed.
I liked how Rey’s parents are nobodies. It was one of the few “twists” I liked in execution and idea. I honestly wouldn’t believe if they said that she had been trained as a child or a toddler and learned how to do mind tricks then, so I always considered her and this excuse way too unrealistic. She was always unbelievable, but very charismatic, which makes me care for her. I really liked how she isn’t connected to anyone, and the theme of the movie that anyone could be a hero and powerful with the force. They pulled that from The Empire Strikes Back, and it was refreshing. One of the things I really didn’t like about the prequels was how the whole “one must be dedicated to the force in order to connect and be strong with it” was pretty much reduced to “who won the biological lottery”. This movie turned that around. So that was pretty cool.
Sure, but even before the whole concept of midi-chlorians in 1977 George Lucas wrote:
“The Force is really a way of seeing; it’s a way of being with life. It really has nothing to do with weapons. The Force gives you the power to have extra-sensory perception and to be able to see things and hear things, read minds and levitate things. It is said that certain creatures are born with a higher awareness of the Force than humans. Their brains are different. The Force is a perception of the reality that exists around us. You have to come to learn it. It’s not something you just get. It takes many, many years…Anyone who studied and worked hard could learn it. But you would have to do it on your own.”
This has been the basis for the entire OT. Anyone can do it, but it’s not something you just get. You have to learn many years. This is how it was depicted with Luke in the OT, who went from a twenty year old youngster learning a few basics from Obi-Wan to becoming a full Jedi over the period of five years. This is also how it was depicted in the PT, despite midi-chlorians, where there were academies to train young students. The ST ignores all this, by having Rey just being able to perform amazing feats in a matter of days. It just doesn’t sit right with me.
I’d also like to just generally say that regardless of how the Force does or does not work, it’s infinitely more satisfying to see someone work towards bettering themselves/a goal instead of just being able to achieve it. Comparing the training sequences in ESB to Rey’s ability to use the Force fairly well without training and I think it’d be easier to understand my point.
PewDiePie? Really?
The lad who did this - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/11/pewdiepie-racism-youtube-games-industry & http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-41222593
and in the first line of his video you linked to says, after mocking the hype re the new Star Wars film, ‘I’m not that big of a Star Wars fan’.
Nandi, if you’re going to post a video or review here etc then add some info and context to it - it’ll help members make a decision as to whether they wish to click on it before doing so.
Do not just post a link.
What does him saying the n-word have to do with anything lol
Given the lad’s history why shouldn’t it be said his opinion may not hold much weight?
Also in the context of ‘I’m not that big of a Star Wars fan’ too.
‘lol’? Really?
I’m not arguing his opinion isn’t absolutely worthless. I’m just asking why would him saying the n-word make his opinion more worthless? One of my best friends is racist towards hispanic people, but I’m not going to start throwing his opinions out the door on other matters regardless of how stupid his feelings are on one matter.
PewDiePie? Really?
The lad who did this - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/11/pewdiepie-racism-youtube-games-industry & http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-41222593
and in the first line of his video you linked to says, after mocking the hype re the new Star Wars film, ‘I’m not that big of a Star Wars fan’.
Nandi, if you’re going to post a video or review here etc then add some info and context to it - it’ll help members make a decision as to whether they wish to click on it before doing so.
Do not just post a link.
What does him saying the n-word have to do with anything lol
On the topic of Yoda (not, but let’s just assume he did for whatever reason) burning books, I really just don’t agree with the idea of burning one-of-a-kind fountains of knowledge for the sake of proving a point to a character. It just seems like a backwards thing to do in general and there’s really no point to it especially because they seemed little more than books full of harmful Jedi ideology and information.
Like I don’t know. If I believed a way of life to be old and outdated and didn’t think it was important to follow it anyone like the Jedi, I wouldn’t feel the need to burn ancient books because in the end that would kind of just make me a cock and if anything I believe in learning from the past. Not burning those books allows you to learn from the past, burning them just feels like trying to hide it.
In The Force Awakens we saw some Senators on balconies or something as they were getting nuked.
That is the one and only piece of evidence that a post-Empire world existed. And now it doesn’t exist, because they were nuked in TFA.
Otherwise it’s exactly as if the Empire never lost power. Perhaps an orderly off-screen transition of power from Palpatine to Snoke occurred in this universe.
It was a complete soft reboot. Somehow they’ve convinced fans to insist that the First Order is just a small little imperial remnant despite all evidence to the contrary.
I agree and that’s really why I don’t like TFA as a film. Aside from my other complaints about the movie, I generally feel like it took the Star Wars story nowhere despite being set 30 years in the future. But I thought The Last Jedi had potential to build off of TFA and flesh out the trilogy in a way that I could enjoy despite my issues of it. Now the idea behind The Last Jedi and the themes in it are interesting (if honestly not all that original to Star Wars as some people keep claiming it is), but the execution left a really bad taste in my mouth. Especially because more than half of that movie was a waste of my time and ultimately pointless as it didn’t progress the plot and just retread a character arc already gone through in The Force Awakens.
That’s partially why the “lol you didn’t like TFA because it wasn’t original, but hated TLJ because it was” argument is really annoying and tiresome. It’s an easy way to deflect criticism while pretending you actually understand the criticism people are saying. Also it’s really just plain insulting.
The lightsaber fight with the Praetor guards honestly seemed “Revenge of the Sith spinning lightsabers at each other” level.
The Praetor guards in the beginning kept spinning and running away from Rey and Kylo. When they did attack, they attacked in the same exact location in the same exact way (ex: overhead swing) and then scurried away when their attack was blocked. It was REALLY hilarious looking.
When the focus of the fight got onto them individually fighting the guards the choreography got better, but was still pretty wonky and hilarious (whip guy reeling in Rey, Rey swinging her lightsaber at nothing while Praetor guy just calmly walked up to her, etc)
Could somebody explain to me why I’m supposed to give a sh*t about Captain Phasma?
Seriously, a lot of people seem to find this character and her ‘story’ interesting. What’s the deal?
Do people care about Phasma?
I was really confused when she appeared again just to get “killed” off again.
Does anybody have anything good to say about the finale in which the star destroyer gets totalled by Laura Dern light-speeding through it and Finn/Rose/Phasma being the only survivors then BB8 piloting an AT-ST?
Come at me with positivity about that whole scene, I could do with a laugh.
It looked cool.
I like Laura Dern as an actress and she played her part well enough.
Snoke’s stretched out Star Destroyer getting wrecked made me feel good because holy fuck that thing was hilarious looking.
Holdo dying was good because she was an annoying character who could have easily removed an hour of runtime from that movie if she just told people her plan.
I have nothing good to say about anything involving Finn, Rose, Phasma, or BB-8.
Snoke was only a big mystery because fans proposed endless theories - there’s nothing in the film itself that invites such rampant speculation.
What about a horribly disfigured and extremely powerful force user that’s the leader of a mysterious new group that took the place of the dead Empire and somehow influenced Ben Solo to turn to the dark side (which everyone in TFA and TLJ kinda acknowledges but there’s still no explanation as to how that happened) and murder his father, fellow students, and attempt to murder his uncle DOESN’T invite speculation?
I’m pretty sure I hated this movie. I was beyond confused with some of the ideas that went into the plot.
The humor was a huge issue in this movie for me and it was obnoxious from the very first moment it appeared (the prank call that helped defeat the Dreadnought). It really did nothing but detract from the movie for me. Like what was I supposed to get out of the “Luke milking a giant aliens breasts in front of Rey and then sloppily drinking the milk so it runs down his chin” scene? That was bizarre as hell.
Then there’s just bizarre moments in the story. One had me laughing more than any of the comedy scenes and I think it should be obvious which scene that is. “Super Leia” killed me. At first I was stunned. We see Kylo Ren hesitate to kill is mother and then his wingmen gun her down and she gets sucked out into space. Wow, great stuff! And to make it better awhile after she’s been dead the camera focuses on her body out in space. Looked really haunting. Then her hand twitched and confusion set in. When she started flying my brain started melting.
Honorable mentions for bizarre plot lines include that Finn/Rose adventure that I’m still confused whether it accomplished absolutely anything at ALL and the Holdo withholding the plans from everyone because plot reasons(?) and then jumping to hyperspace in Snoke’s ships and annihilating it completely (with Finn and Rose conveniently surviving everything while the ship around them and the dozens of troopers and Phasma herself just disappeared from that execution party they were having because…plot?).
Wasted potential with Snoke too. I was interested in learning who he was and then they just kill him. Who taught him the ways of the dark side? How was he influencing Kylo Ren? How did they know he was influencing Kylo Ren? How did he become leader of the First Order if he’s a nobody? Why did the director decide that having a terrible shot of Snoke dead and sticking out his tongue with a goofy expression on his face was necessary and did anything aside from detract from how threatening Snoke was in the previous scenes?
Why did Luke also try to murder Kylo in his sleep? He put the Rebellion at risk and his own personal safety at risk in Return of the Jedi in order to save Darth Vader. But his nephew is being turned to the darkness and the first thing to come to his mind is loom over him with a turned on lightsaber in his sleep and contemplate murdering him? What? Why did Luke become so disillusioned with the Jedi when arguably he was the one that pushed Ben over the edge? Why did Kylo collapse the house on both of them and how did Kylo escape fine but Luke was trapped there while his temple burned? Instead of taking responsibility for his actions, why did he run away and leave his friends alone and weaker against this rising new threat? Why did the writers use Luke Skywalker as a foil to the ideas of BOTH the Jedi and Sith instead of Kylo Ren who was set up to have actual issues with both and ended up rejecting both in the end anyways?
And I’m looking over all I’ve written about this movie and realizing…yeah I did hate this flick. It was pretty terrible.
So I haven’t bought any of the DLC and I don’t have a PS+ subscription. I selected to play a single player hero battle offline and it let me play as Dengar! What gives? Is this a temporary promo (I hope not)? Or are they letting everyone have the new heroes for free now? Either way it’s cool to finally get something new in the single player!
Fwiw I googled for an answer and came up empty handed.
Probably either a temporary promo or a glitch. Or maybe they let people dick around with DLC heroes in offline content? I don’t know really, Google came up with nothing for me.
Reviving from the kind of dead for this little exciting bit of news for the beloved Star Wars™ Battlefront™ by EA DICE™!
The brand new Bespin DLC brings back 2 new iconic characters from the beloved Original Trilogy: Lando Calrissian with his absolutely bitchin’ cape that I always wanted as a kid and the famous bounty hunter Dengar (I think he appeared in ESB for maybe 20 seconds)!
Continuing the Battlefront topic, I recently played the Outer Rim maps (they were, maybe still are, free to play). I pretty much have the same opinion about them as I do about most of the maps: wasted potential. This goes triple for Jabba’s Palace which was one of my favorite all time original Battlefront maps. Not only does the design feel a little off (his palace is very clean looking, well kept, and oddly reflective considering that the game takes place post-RotJ on that map), it just feels poorly designed for what game modes it offers with a ton of camping points available. The incredibly tight design of the palace also leads to the Jawa Shock Blaster (I have no idea why this is in the game, why it functions like a shotgun, or why it’s called a Shock Blaster if it fires normal blaster bolts) being insanely OP since it kills in about 2 hits at about any range on the Palace. Lack of AI and the dead Rancor isn’t fun either. Other maps felt weak too.
Greedo wasn’t fun to play as at all, but Nien Nunb wasn’t horrible to play as. They both really shouldn’t be in the game at all, but I guess DICE is desperate for heroes to shove in the game since they locked themselves from using both TFA characters and Prequel characters.
Republic Commando is also an excellent game and I hope the rumors about Imperial Commando are true.
Rumors? What rumors?
LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga is probably one of the best Star Wars games. The level design is always top notch (The PT levels are really, really fun and I don’t actually like the OT levels as much for some reason), the visual humor just clicks with me, the gameplay is good, and it’s an amazing couch co-op game. I’m pretty excited for LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens even though I didn’t like to movie too much because the gameplay refinements look really good. Too bad it’s apparently going to be voice acted. Republic Commando is also an excellent game and I hope the rumors about Imperial Commando are true.
The phantom menace game is my favorite one. No kidding it is a perfect blend of action and puzzles. Also am I the only one who misses the days were you could save your game pretty much were ever you wanted? Video games do that less and less nowadays.
The Phantom Menace game was incredibly fun and I have very fond memories of playing it with my dad when I was maybe 5-6.
Battlefront 2 was just announced for 2017, and will evidently include ST-era content:
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/star-wars-battlefront-2-confirmed-features-content/1100-6439682/
This is some horribly depressing news to be honest. Battlefront has only finished up one quarter of it’s intended four parts in its season pass and the last piece of content coming will be in 2017. So there’s a fuck ton of content that still needs to be developed. Not to mention they have Battlefield 1 in development, how do they plan on developing a sequel that improves upon the original with additional content from the ST? What about the PT? Are they going to dump out another pretty looking and sounding game with minimal content and dumbed down gameplay along with a nice 50 dollar season pass?
Pretty much sums it up exactly.
I dunno if you play on PC, or with a gamepad, but mouse and keyboard flying is absolute shit. Just. Total crap. Worse than the flight controls in GTAV, and I know flight can be done well because I was a goddamn wizard with the choppers in Battlefield 3 and 4 (also made by DICE. What?). And if you do use a gamepad and the flying is still awful, then I’m blown away. Space would be utterly unplayable in this game.
The spawns are indeed shit as well. You get the choice of your partner (which is decent if you’re in a group, but you only get one? What? Not a squad?) or a completely random spawn which is almost ALWAYS miles away from the action which means you get to run for about two minutes before someone at max level picks you off with a pulse rifle shot.
The card system is inane. Why cards? Why is that cool to do right now? The game would be objectively better if, instead of earning a “card” for the jump pack, you just earned the fucking jump pack. It’s the same damn thing, just one makes sense in the universe and the other is a… deck of cards? It’s stupid. Plus there are cards in the game at higher levels that just make your character more powerful at base, which is completely baffling and bullshit.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the powerups in concert with this. I get that there were powerups in Battlefront 1 and 2, but it’s 2016 now. I’m playing a Rebel trooper and I see an AT-ST bearing down on us, ripping us apart and I go for the powerup to get a rocket launcher to take it out… only the random powerup is a probe droid. Great. (This example would be better if the AT-STs weren’t made of paper). I would have been okay with the loss of classes as a thing if they had just given us the ability to build loadouts to replicate classes, but as it is, you just get a blaster and a deck of cards, one of which you have to pick up charges to use.
I felt like the maps were the strong point of the game, but with so few of them, they do become very samey very quickly after a couple of rounds, especially if you’re only playing one game mode (there’s about one map per environment per game mode, but you’ll never see them all if you just want to play one mode).
The heroes are pretty much a joke, yes. To the point where if one is close and has seen me I just stop playing because there’s nothing you can do but die instantly. They’re fun to play as, just running around and destroying players, and there’s a decent amount of strategy involved in playing each “class” of hero intelligently, but they completely unbalance the game.
People (myself included) were worried that the game would just be Battlefield with a Star Wars skin, but after playing the game I wish it had been, because this is somewhere between Battlefield and Battlefront, but not in a good way. It’s just a horrible, malformed child of the two franchises.
That said, I hop in and play a few rounds now and then to scratch that itch. The first couple of rounds are a beautiful experience, everything sounds (their sound designer posts blogs on their site now and then about how much intense care went into mixing each sound to fit the galaxy with Soundcloud examples of each layer of the ambience, and they’re amazing to read) and looks and feels spot-on Star Wars to me. About four rounds in, the ugliness starts to show through the cracks and I have to quit before I get angry at the game. It’s a classic Star Wars video game story: “There was so much potential there, but… they dropped the ball somewhere along the line.”
Yeah I play on PC. It really blows me away because flying is actually worse than it was in Battlefront 2. That game had janky as fuck flying, but this is really ridiculous. It’s only bearable with a gamepad, but even then it’s awkward as hell. Some people actually seem to be good at it and are able to kill troops on the ground easily by flying around which astounds me, but it is what it is I guess.
Power ups are not in Battlefront 2 (I can’t remember if they are in the first or not, but they aren’t in two). The power up system is a huge, dumb issue though. I can’t even begin to understand why they thought that power ups and the card system was better than the class system in BF1 and 2. In BF1 and 2 you decide how you want to play just by choosing a class. You can be a sniper, an engineer, an anti-tank class, or just a regular soldier. In addition to that you had unique classes for each faction like the Magna Guard for the CIS or the amazing Dark Trooper for the Empire. Heroes were also gained via points and playing decently if I remember over scrambling to some random drop point (or worse, never getting a hero drop because the other team kicks your team’s shit in so badly you can’t make it to the Hero power). It’s boring and it’s bullshit.
I don’t like the maps really at all. It took me about 7 hours to realize that there actually are Ewoks on Endor, but they don’t do anything at all. Same for Jawas. It’s a pointless addition of NPCs when BF 1 and 2 was much more creative in that area. Also sure, the maps look gorgeous and I think some maps are designed well when it comes to balancing like Tatooine and Jakku. But then there are maps like Hoth and Sullust where one side has a clear advantage over the other in terms of spawning and control points. I don’t know anything about the Outer Rim maps, but if I’m correct Jabba’s Palace is one of the maps. I hope that they did something interesting and added a Rancor and Gamorrean guards, but I’m probably hoping for too much.
It’s not a bad game if you need a time sink though. It’s pretty, it sounds good (I guess it does at least, people love to praise the sound design for being outstanding, but the Thermal Imploder was really the only eargasmic sound for me), and it’s kind of fun. But mostly the feeling I get when I play the new Battlefront is just disappointment. And that disappointment only grows when I come back to watching this amazing internal footage of the canceled Battlefront 3 and I can only think on how this looks like a straight improvement from BF2 while EA BF is a step back.
So I actually just played the new Battlefront for 4 hours.
I just want to get this out of the way: flying is absolutely garbage. I have no idea how they shipped out this game with these ship controls and thought it was okay. Moving the ships around is an incredible struggle in both the first and third person modes. I’m actually more glad than angry that space battles aren’t in this game anymore, they would have been absolute shit.
The spawning system is also a joke. From what I understand, you have a partner. I’m not sure if you can choose one or not, but it doesn’t really matter. This one partner is your spawn point and that’s about it. Compare that to the control points acting as spawn points in BF1 + 2 and it’s really bad. Spawning is also instant aside from being forced to watch the kill cams. There’s only about 2 instances where I had to wait maybe 3 seconds to spawn and I’m not sure why.
The removal of the class system was a huge mistake. The replacement card system is awkward and the grind to get better cards is just an absolute chore. Having a selection of weapons is okay, but in the end they feel really similar to each other in regards to how they all handle and sound. The balancing of these weapons is kind of a joke to. There’s this heavy blaster called the RT-97C. The statistics in game show it to be a straight upgrade to the DLT-19 so I used it and it’s actually worse than the DLT-19 for some reason despite having a faster RoF and longer range(?). I’m not even sure why this is, all I know is when I used the weapon I was missing an incredible amount of shots I would have gotten with the DLT-19. There are also higher rank weapons which killed me a lot faster than my lower level weapons that I don’t know the name of.
Maps are surprisingly boring to play on. I think this partially has to do with the removal of the class system and the worse spawning system, but I’m not sure. There are really only 4 or so maps with Endor and I believe Hoth being split up to provide some sort of false sense of variety. Hoth played the best for me with the well spaced cover, the open spaces with trenches, and the decent spawning for Supremacy(?). Endor and Sullust(?) are pretty to look at, but that’s about it. The odd placement of control points of Sullust along with the awkwardly placed cover made it somewhat a chore to play and Endor was incredibly disorienting for me to fight on with the overwhelming detail and very tight spawning. Tatooine was boring and I’m disappointed at all of the maps for not doing anything cool like Battlefront 1 and 2 did with the hostile planet NPCs (Sand People for BF1 and Gamorrean warriors for BF2), friendly planet NPCs (Gungans on Naboo and the fucking Ewoks on Endor), neutral NPCs (Jawas on Tatooine), or environmental dangers (traps for vehicles on Endor, bridges on Mustafar). It’s such a waste of good potential, it really bothers me.
I also have a huge problem with the Heroes. The first issue I noticed was that Luke Skywalker’s voice actor is absolutely terrible. Shockingly bad. It physically pains me to listen to this. Second, Heroes are balanced horribly. Instead of giving them a timer, slightly more health, enhanced agility, and unique abilities they really just decided to make them have an insane amount of health, lock-on abilites, and make them all slow as fuck. In BF2, I remember being able to take down a Hero alone if they were mediocre and I knew how to use my class properly. Now it feels like the most you can do to fight a hero is grab a bunch of pals and spray. It’s really not fun. The third thing I noticed is that Greedo and Nien Nunb as heroes are hilarious, absolutely hilarious. It’s kind of hard to tell them apart from some Rebel skins sometimes because in they end they’re just background characters in the movies and don’t stand out (people would argue Greedo stands out, but I’d argue back that there’s nothing actually special about him. Only the “Who shot first?” shit makes him special, other than that he’s a character who only lived and died to characterize Han better).
So overall it’s a game that looks incredible, runs even better, but plays horribly. I wouldn’t really even consider buying it for the price it’s at now ($24). Maybe for 15 dollars I’d buy the base game and I’m not sure how much I’d spend for the season pass.
“So what I told you was true, from a certain point of view.”
“A certain point of view!?”
Always gets a chuckle out of me.
Well as I said, SWTOR is not for spoiled impatient players who are after constant “action”. It is a more realistic approach. I can certainly appreciate the vastness of the maps, etc. It adds to the immersion quality. Also, I think the main character story nicely blends with planet-specific side stories.
And SWTOR can be easily considered as KOTOR3 because MMO aspects can be ignored/bypassed almost entirely (I know that for the fact as I did exactly that).
I don’t understand this argument, SWTOR itself tends to be more action than storytelling just because of the MMO model. KotOR 1 and 2 had really great, long, and slow storytelling moments like this
Spoilers for KotOR 2, very late game exposition
or this
Spoilers for KotOR Tatooine, Sand People backstory specifically. Note there are 3 parts.
Yes there were moments when action was placed at the front over storytelling (both KotOR games do this at the end for reasons I will never understand), but even those moments honestly pale in comparison to the sheer amount of detail in storytelling.
There’s really nothing like this in SWTOR (partially because of the MMO scale of the game and partially because of the dialogue wheel which limits player interaction considerably). Yes there are long cutscenes with a lot of exposition, but those cutscenes tend to express very little about the world in comparison to the interactions you’d find in KotOR games.
And there are ways to add immersion without increasing map scale. Adding AI with believable pathing around the maps, increasing player interaction with the world, good storytelling, etc etc. The problem with SWTOR is that immersion was doomed to be fucked from the start, no matter what you do. There’s nothing quite like going on a quest that should be personal only to see a few players that are essentially the exact same person as you walk through a green forcefield limited to your class. Then there’s the lack of interaction in the world (no optional characters to just chat with, extremely limited companion interaction, the horrifying MMO UI, the forcefields I mentioned earlier, seeing other characters go through the same quests as you, the dreadful animations (This is just embarrassing and you see these shit quality animations in most Bioware games now), NPCs being completely stiff and unmoving in stories unless you interact with them (see link just posted too for example of that), and it goes on and on and on. These issues will always hurt immersion more than big maps can even add immersion.
JediExile said:
Yeah it makes him fun to watch, if a little bit goofy at times.I don’t know if goofy is the right word. Jar Jar is goofy.
I don’t know, that scene with Kylo freaking the fuck out and hitting the monitors he was looking at was really goofy to me. It reminded me of Vader choking out all those Imps in ESB, except less intimidating. Then there was also the scene where Rey escaped and he had another tantrum.