Imagine my distaste when I quest required me to do TWO! jumps off a pipe onto another pipe, and if I failed, I had to go all the way to the beginning of this long pipe bridge.
I tried twice. I fell in the gross stinky water. Then I dropped the quest.
Seriously, jumping is bullshit. Dammit, this is an MMO, not a, uh… FPS? Portal? Whatever.
I am just going to accept that I can’t jump worth a crap, and I will drop all associated quests and thumb my nose at any missed rewards (which might be just as ravishingly awesome as my aforementioned Skunk-In-Bra outfit). And hope that I don’t hit a situation where my failure at jumping brings my progression to a grinding halt.
(To those of you participating in beta this weekend, HAPPY BETA-ING!)
This hasn’t come up yet, because I haven’t posted any spoilers, but it WILL happen! And I want to make sure it is APPROPRIATELY HIDDEN for you guys.
For a very short spoiler, I will simply black it out, like so, and you will have to highlight over it. This low tech method will black out the offending spoiler, and it will also be blacked out in mobile theme and in feeds. (A “reveal spoiler” button will not really do much in a feed or mobile theme.)
For a long spoiler, I will put SPOILER in the title, followed by a warning at the start of the article…
On the SITE, I will simply cut off the article so it only displays the SPOILER WARNING portion of the article on the front page of the blog, and you can choose whether to click through or not.
For a long spoiler in the FEED, that is what I need help on.
Option 1: I truncate the feed for spoiler articles only. It will be a pain in the ass to click through if you are behind a firewall, but there is little danger of accidentally seeing something you don’t want to.
Option 2: I don’t truncate the feed for spoiler articles, since truncated feeds are annoying. I will put up “SPOILER” in the title and a big SPOILER WARNING at the beginning of the article, but you will be responsible for averting your eyes and moving on to the next article in your feed reader.
There’s a poll embedded here, so you will have to click through (yuck). HALP.
[poll id=”2″]
Edit: If you are interested in what I consider a SPOILER, see the Spoiler Policy, under construction. TL;DR a spoiler is a revelation about the story, not about mechanics.
YES, I KNOW I AM LAME. I know that it’s stupid to spend the first night in regular-beta goggling at the character creation screen.
But holy crap, guys… there is a lot of stuff I didn’t realize before. A twi’lek is not necessarily a twi’lek. Available features for a character species can change by faction or class. SERIOUSLY.
So, let’s have a disclaimer here that I’m not the most thorough tester and things are liable to change…
Cyborgs
Each class has its own cybernetics. Seriously. It’s not just per faction, it’s by class.
The smuggler ones are still old and “clunky.” Hopefully they get an overhaul like some of the others that look incredibly swanky. Because right now I’m so wishing I could be an imperial agent.
Male and female of the same class appear to get the same cybernetics.
Male facial hair is “attached” to cybernetic options. Which I hate but I suppose that not all beards go with all implants.
Humans
Imperial Bounty Hunters can have face paint (tied to cosmetics slider in females)
Sith Warriors and Republic Troopers can have facial tattoos (tied to cosmetics slider in females)
Edit: Sith Inquisitors have “slave scars”
Miraluka
For whatever reason, the females at least have far fewer hairdos than the other human-like-races. But they still have many varieties of the mohawk (?!)
Rattataki
Edit: Sith Inquisitors have slave scars.
Sith Pureblood
Edit: Sith Inquisitors have slave scars.
Twi’lek
Edit: Sith Inquisitors have slave scars.
Lekku pattern is tied on one slider with cosmetics (for females). I hate that. Thought I’d share.
Edit: Empire/Republic have different Lekku Markings
Zabrak
Empire and Republic have different tattoo options.
Empire has option of red skin. Republic does not.
Imperial zabraks have red rings around their irises (which looks EVIL).
Edit: Sith Inquisitors have slave scars.
All the Republic female tattoos include the chin and remind me of a goatee or 5 o’clock shadow. So sad.
If you want to see a long video overview of character creation, go here! It’s far better than any of MY screenies would be. Oh wait, it turns out I couldn’t properly take screenies and ended up installing fraps. I hope to be less fail soon.
Last weekend, a bunch of my friends got into beta. Their weekend consisted of picking up hot pockets and not leaving the house. My weekend was very different, as you saw. Besides the computer issues, I am still a parent, and I can’t just drop everything and throw myself into testing. I guess I could have skipped WoW raids, but the rest of the weekend was not negotiable.
When giving feedback after the testing weekend, I pointed out that for some players, playtime crammed into a weekend is not possible.
If you think of it, that self-selects the type of player giving feedback. The players who can drop everything do drop everything and test their little pants off. However, these are probably not the casual players that are becoming an increasingly large portion of the market. If you want to get data from casual players, you need a testing schedule that accommodates those players.
I doubt they read my little QQ, but a day after RSVPing for the beta weekend (that all testers were invited to) I did get a second email inviting me to test. Wait, I have already gotten an email about beta weekend… is this a duplicate? Nope, it’s just normal beta.
Oh. Snap.
I will be able to actually participate and be useful! I have a little time after the Little Jedi is asleep. I can play like I normally do, over the course of a week or so, and maybe I’ll notice things that Mr. Power-through over the weekend didn’t see.
The weekend of November 11-13, I beta tested SWTOR. Now that the NDA is up, I can tell what I saw.
I have almost nothing to report. I am super-lame.
Friday:
Downloaded the client and patch.
Went to WoW Raid.
Went to bed.
No, seriously, I didn’t even log in.
Saturday:
I created a character very quickly and ran around. My frame rate was the suck. Ok, no big deal, I’ll just turn down my graphics. Pew pew, this is fun. A little choppy but fun.
I went back into the character creation screen. Hey, why do these two faces look exactly the same? And these two complexion settings. Hey, why do they look different on my husband’s PC? ACK MY VIDEO CARD.
What if I’m picking horrible facial features for my toons and can’t even see it, but everyone else can see it because they don’t have a craptastic video card? THE HORROR.
Ran to Fry’s. Got new video card.
Back home, tried to install the card and discovered my power supply was inadequate.
Swearing occurred.
Found a power supply around the house (don’t ask) that was better than my current one. But was unable to attempt installation myself because OMG THE WIRES, THE FREAKIN WIRES!
Begged neighbor to help and bribed with cookies. Neighbor could help on Sunday, due to being completely occupied with playing the beta at the moment.
Went to Saturday night’s WoW raid. Then bed.
Sunday:
Took Little Jedi to the park. And lunch.
Got home and the husband took the PC over to the neighbor’s house, so he could help us install the power supply and video card.
PC came home. Graphics worked great. Sound didn’t work at all. LOLWUT?
After intense driver reinstallation and testing, discovered that sound worked fine if speakers were connected through the USB port.
Ran to Fry’s minutes before closing to grab an adaptor. Fry’s employees had no flippin clue what I was asking for. Had to bribe Little Jedi with candy in the checkout line.
Fed Little Jedi and put her to bed.
OH RIGHT, and then I got to play the game.
In conclusion:
I have nothing useful to say about much other than character creation and video cards. I hope this upcoming weekend is more productive.
I’ve been obsessed with polls lately, mostly so I don’t create a cookie cutter toon right out of the box. I found on the official forums a really super-complete poll about gender/species/class/role/alignment. According to said poll, 20% of players plan to play female toons, and 72% plan to play male toons, with 8% undecided (lookit me doing math here).1
Now… I know full well that there are a lot of guys who play female toons, but very few girls who play male toons. I’m also scratching my head because in my WoW guild, the gender ratios IRL are close to 50/50, with some guys playing girls in-game. In general, in all the guilds I’ve been in during my WoW time, the male/female ratios have been pretty reasonable, and it was very rare that I was the only female in a 10-person raid.
But hey, there’s a poll that incorporates guys playing girls too!2 If you add together girls-playing-female-toons and guys-playing-female-toons, you get 35% of the TOONS will be female (which is not the same as the 20% above, not at all). If you add together the number of girls-playing-female-toons and girls-playing-male-toons, it comes out to 8% of the players IRL will be female.3
LOLWUT? 8% can that be right?4 I was used to being the lone girl when I started playing MMO’s, but this ain’t 2001. And it seems to me that the game concept is no more “testosterone-filled” than SWG or WoW, and there were PLENTY of women playing those. So what gives?
I’m forced to the conclusion that, uh… women aren’t as freakishly obsessed with the game as the men are and don’t bother to respond to these silly polls. I don’t know where I’m going with this. You can’t really trust random polls… or my math and analysis.
The sample size for this poll is 9000+. In the previous complete poll from which the current one is derived, female toons were at 19%, male toons at 78%, and undecided at 3%. With 3000+ responses, the previous version did not have as large a pool. ↩
This poll has a little over 2000 responses, whereas the complete poll cited above has over 9000 responses, and there is a definite result discrepancy. ↩
Which, again, we’re taking with a grain of salt given that there are a little over 2000 responses to the poll. ↩
Just to get this out of the way… this does NOT give away any beta information. It’s just a commentary on my own inability to handle character creation in any game in a calm manner.
I do not want to look like everyone else…
When Blood Elves were introduced in WoW, there was a totally pretty new hairdo, the “Raquel.” Of course, I saw a ton of blood elves with that same hairdo within the first week. It was pretty uniform and pretty lame. I was pretty happy I had not picked that hairdo, despite how much I liked it.
This is the best image I could find (courtesy of wowpedia). I'm aware that it's actually a human.
What might be the thing you objectively like the best may be the most cookie cutter of them all… be it race or options within that race.
Now, if only there were a list ahead of time for what to avoid, without having to roll a toon, see the same thing over and over, and then reroll. In a game that I’m familiar with (WoW) by now I know exactly what to avoid. That doesn’t help me with a first toon in a new game.
I also want a character with… character…
What do I mean by this? Well… I don’t want an ordinary character or, worse, one excessively attractive. It’s so tempting to make a character that is perfect.
In SWG, there was a slider for weight. You could be as fat as you wanted. There was also a boob slider, and you could be as busty as you wanted. I cannot even TELL you how many “girls” tried to be “excessively pretty” by going minimum weight and maximum boob1, or boys who tried to go “buff-o-riffic” with max muscles and minimum fat.2 And who had freckles? Right, nobody. The unibrow option was similarly unused.
Scars, tattoos, whatever… my character needs some grit, not to be a blemish-free teen. Also, I will not be a human ever again in any game, ever. HELLO! I’m a human IRL.
But I choose conservatively when options cannot be changed later…
A spiky hairdo might feel badass for a week, and then you’ll get bored with it. Bright pink skin might be awesome, until you discover it looks like crap with half the outfits out there.
In SWG, since I was an image designer, I tried on all sorts of crazy looks that didn’t “stand the test of time” because I knew that I could just change my skin to match my clothes, rather than my clothes to go with my skin. Although when first picking my character, before getting master image designer, I picked a boring tan skin color for my Twi’lek because I knew it wouldn’t look hideous with anything.
In WoW (pre-barber shop) I spent a hell of a lot of time picking things like skin tone and hairdo… not necessarily for the one I liked best, but the one that was least likely to piss me off down the road (i.e. I would pass over a hairdo I liked if I thought it might clip with my clothes).
This is my first wow toon. A human. No facial piercings, bland and pretty. I eventually grew so bored with the blandness, but at least I wasn’t stuck with a toon that I just hated.
And I don’t want to be unhappy with my character
The last thing I need is to reroll just because I cannot stand to LOOK at my toon. Which, yes, I have done that. Face it, if you get too far outside your comfort zone, you just won’t connect with your character.
This was my tailor on test center in SWG (sorry for the small pic size). This was my first and only Zabrak. I just could NOT get over the receding hairline look for every damn hairdo. I really tried.
This is my human in SWG. I convinced myself that I needed my combat toon to be a human for the superior racials. But she just looked weird, no matter what I did.
And this, of course was my Twi’lek in SWG. When I think of my time in SWG, this was “me.” And the others just could not replace the one that was “me” regardless of my need for better racials (human) or a less popular race for females (zabrak).
When SWTOR Launches
I’ll be right behind you. By a few hours or days. Agonizing over the character creation screen.
Maximum boob ended up clipping many outfits and looking ridiculous. ↩
Going minimum weight and maximum muscles led to a very triangular shape and a “girly waist.” When guys begged me to give them abs, I had to convince them that some weight was needed to fill out the girly waist and give the impression of a normal midsection. ↩
And since that’s all that’s I can say, we get to talk about my feeeeeelings.
Back in the day, I would have been bouncing off the walls with anticipation. Now… I’m older, wiser, and don’t have as much time. Get off my lawn.
Pros of participating in said game testing program:
I will see if my PC will run it. If not, it’s a trip to Fry’s for me.
I will see if I like it.
Cons of participating in said game testing program:
What if I hate it?! I’ve already preordered.
It’s kinda… spoilerific to do a beta.
I don’t have as much time as I used to.
I’m a little burnt out on working srs hard to make a game better… for free.
Ok, that last point is the main one. After SWG and the correspondent program, I was just so… done with investing oodles of time and effort into making a game better. For free. Now, there were people who really wanted to get into the industry1 so it made sense for them to throw themselves wholeheartedly into this endeavor, but that wasn’t me. I worked so hard because I was really attached to the game and I have trouble doing a half-assed job.
I haven’t done a beta in about 5 years, I was that burnt out. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even bother signing up for the ones in WoW. I haven’t set foot on the PTR either.
So the question is will I be able to give reasonably good feedback (the whole reason companies have beta) without the game just monopolizing my life while I have access. And with a kid who wants to go to the park, do I even have time to do it right? Because park always beats gaming.
We shall see. And by “we” I mean “me” because, duh, there’s an NDA.
Some of them did, and are working for Bioware! Woot for them. ↩
