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(on Wikipedia)
https://www.swtor.com/

Yet another MMO, but this one is set in the Star Wars universe. Because light sabres, yo.

Conclusion: Amateur night.

This would have been great in the late nineties. Right now, the voiceovers are fantastic but the quest interactive cutscenes are ugly. The choices are sometimes vague and unforgiving. There is spectacular effort with all the rendered videos, but that just took away from resources for the game itself.

• Star Wars – The Old Republic, on Linux?

Resources ∞

• https://swtor.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Old_Republic_Wiki [ 1 ]
• voat.co/v/swtor

• https://www.reddit.com/r/swtor/

2015-10-04 ∞

• I had performance issues yesterday, probably because of the download in progress. I left the download to finish overnight.
• Well I got a nice cutscene when logging in. It appears that a huge amount of money got spent on the cutscenes and not enough on the damned game itself, which has a terribad old feeling to it.
• I wanted to make another character but, like so much, all of the good stuff is locked from free-to-play.
• Going into the new character stuff, I wanted to go back to play my other character and get it to level 10 to investigate unlocking races.. but it gave me ‘exit’ buttons, which is confusing. It should just have ‘back’ which goes all the way back to the character selection screen.
• The things I have targetted are not indicated on the minimap.
• So I removed some shock collars from slaves to free them, and the other dude decides to run ahead.. except his shock collar is still on.
• Too many of the quests have missing or confusing choices. Too many quest givers are taken as honest.
• Oh ugh, the old fashioned wait for quest items to re-spawn.
• My npc calling a turret “dirtbag” is hilarious.
• Why the fuck would I blow up a starship? It would be awesome if I could get the parts, a droid, clear the place out for who is supposed to be my boss, repair the ship and keep it as a reward. But noooo.
• So I betray and then lie to a quest giver, and somehow I make credits. But that’s okay, the quest is repeatable.. so.. I can do it again? I’m sure he won’t catch on.
• So I free this dude from kryptonite carbonite, but I have the opportunity to free three others to make things interesting. Don’t I want to screw with this other gangster?

• So these boxes of legacy gear have pieces which just take up valuable inventory space. I have no bank, these things aren’t used to unlock the constume pieces like I thought, they’re just sitting there. I opened one box by mistake and it takes up 7 of my 30 slots. If I opened both of these “bonuses” I’d lost almost half my inventory space!

  • No, it’s worthless to use as “starting armour”.. nothing can hurt you until later, where you’ll already have proper gear and don’t need this shit, which will just take up inventory space.
  • Oh, can it be sent to other characters? You mean the single other character? The one I’d have to make as a mule just to keep this sort of junk?
  • I can’t create a ticket. There’s no way for me to get help with shit like this or my problem with giving my friend the referral bonus.

• I really strongly hate that I’m worried more about how my follower is going to react to my quest choices than how I want to play out my personal story.

Not enough bag space. This is by far the biggest slap in the face to a new player. I’m just going to give up.

2015-10-03 ∞

• Apparently I signed up years go, but I don’t know where my password went, and lavabit.com is dead so I can’t retrieve it.
• I made a new account, only to later learn that there’s a referral program. However, the program doesn’t actually work for that account.
• I made another new account to try, and failed.

• I then logged out and clicked the link to have it prompt me to make a third account

  • There was no feedback as to if the referral worked.
  • It did ask me to verify my email address, which was mentioned in What steps do my friends have to take in order to participate in the Friends of SWTOR program?
  • My friend did not get any mention of me in account.swtor.com/user/refer
  • Maybe I have to subscribe for them to get credit? Maybe just play? As of now I’m still installing. Oh, that above link says I have to click ‘Play’. So maybe it just has to confirm that I’m actually playing the game before allowing the referral. Sure, whatever.
  • See also How do I know if my friend is eligible for the free trial?

• I did the minimum download with their launcher, then clicked ‘Play’ and the launcher disappeared.. the game did not start. There were some leftover processes though..

  • It’s nice to be able to play the starting stuff while the rest is downloading. This is precisely the feature I wanted with those other recently-tested games.
• I ran the launcher again, and then some fullscreen load screen showed up. It gave 1024×768, which applied to everything, so viewing the task manager fucked over my desktop resolution. This is also not even a widescreen resolution. What are these people thinking? I waited a long while and that shit application didn’t go anywhere. It didn’t even have a load indicator.
• Switching to windowed fullscreen, dropping to my desktop, fixing the resolution, then returning to the game gives me a black screen.
• Alt-F4 and then re-starting the launcher does work. Why the hell doesn’t the game know about my resolution and work with it by default?
• Oh god damn this looks old as hell.
• The species selection boxes at the bottom are all blank.
• The click-drag to rotate the model is wonky.
• Some amusing customization, I guess.
• The default camera rotation speed is way too fast, and it gets even faster.. but there’s no fine grain to it. I can make it slower but it’s a touch too slow for my preference.
• It’s great to have voiceover for everything. This is way the hell better than Final Fantasy 14[doesn’t exist]‘s walls of text.
• When picking up an inventory item, the item icon jumps away from where I clicked it. That’s jarring.
• So after talking to my superior and being told to drop my accent, I keep talking with it. Sigh.
• Some of the text flies too quick for the voiceovers. They’re not saying enough gibberish.
• I’m told to stay 5m back from the hut, but I walk right up to him.
• How do I know there are exactly three listening devices in my room? Wait, how did I even get a room?
• Ugh, there was some popup text at the top-middle but it went way too fast for even my quick reading.
• Oh, I completed a quest.. in the middle of my room.. and somehow got a weapon.
• So Karrels Javis witnesses me kill someone in the room he’s in, but his dialogue doesn’t fit at all. “Enjoying yourself”, indeed.
• Ok ok, the moustache on Karrels Javis clips through his lip way too much.
• Oh, I got a title. But I can’t apply it.
• I walked into a quest area and got stuck in place. Logging out gives me a load twiddler thing and it takes forever to load.
• Oh, it lets me activate a character. Is that a subscription?
• Selecting the character to play just kills the client.
• The launcher doesn’t remember my password. Bah.
• Logging in from the launcher takes fucking forever to pull up a loading screen. Is this because I’m still downloading data?
• Selecting the character to play just kills the client. FAIL.
• Well fuck, it seems that the installer lied about the required drive space. I had nothing left even though I cleared more than enough. I cleared more, but the client would not re-start. I logged out and in again and it appears to be operating as expected.
• Oh fuck, this is another one of those games where not all droids have data cores. Uuuuugh the grind.
• I had to reset a quest and run all the way back to my room to pick up explosives. Fucking bugged storyline quest.
• I did it all the fuck over again, and it still won’t work. I killed a guard and got the yellow beacon. It progressed the quest line, but I cannot access the door panel.. there is no uniform in my inventory and murdering scores of guards doesn’t drop anything special.
• Fucking hell, there’s a separate inventory for mission items.
• I have to physically go to a trainer? Eww.
• Holy shit what a pain in the ass it is to get back to my room.
• Uh.. I used some blue tube thing, and it blew up and made me glow and heal.. but it blew up my clothes.
• I wanted to tell Karrels Javis the truth about his sons, but I wasn’t given the option. Maybe I misunderstood the story. I didn’t think the crippled one was being held hostage.
• When I take a taxi, my companion disappears during the trip.
• There are moments when there is some sort of very loud narration which I guess is supposed to be some npcs having a conversation in the distance.

• After having a companion for a while, I’m finally told how in the fuck to understand what changes their affection. However, it says I learn more in their codex. There is no codex. I saw it once a while back, but there is no button, no menu entry and no hotkey which summons it. Fucking hell.

  • I had to search online for an answer. It’s hidden in the mission log ( L ) for some reason.

• With no way to get to some sort of global/zone/advice channel to ask for help, this game becomes quite opaque.

  • It unlocked at level 10, by which time I’ve been frustrated as all hell. Even when unlocked, there’s a rate limiter, which screws up actual conversation.
• unsolved – I got punished for opening one of my costume boxes, and now I have a pile of items I can’t do anything with. They don’t seem to be “learnable” as I would expect. So I’m fucked over for inventory slots. Sigh.
• My companion has worn items which have no icon. So when removed, they just appear as a green border in my inventory. =/

• The tutorials list needs a search feature.

(date unknown) – Linux notes ∞

(on Wine)

2019-09-21 – These are just some ancient notes I found in a text file.

appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=24528

Wine bug?

• Installer, custom install, when selecting an install location if I type any character in the top location field it crashes.

launcher.exe crashes when the mouse is moved over any actionable item.

  Exception: resolve: Unknown error
  X Error of failed request:  BadPixmap (invalid Pixmap parameter)
    Major opcode of failed request:  93 (X_CreateCursor)
    Resource id in failed request:  0x0
    Serial number of failed request:  29129
    Current serial number in output stream:  29133

1) Installed wine using smart
2) Uninstalled wine
3) rpm -i this:

software.opensuse.org/search/download?base=ALL&file=openSUSE%3A%2F11.3%2Fstandard%2Fi586%2Fwine-gecko-1.0.0-1.4.i586.rpm&query=wine

Whoops, that’s too old. Trying this:

software.opensuse.org/search/download?base=ALL&file=Emulators%3A%2FWine%2FopenSUSE_Factory%2Fnoarch%2Fwine-gecko-1.4-21.1.noarch.rpm&query=wine-gecko

4) rpm -i this:

software.opensuse.org/search/download?base=ALL&file=Education%2FSLE-11%2Fi586%2Fwine-1.3.32-1.1.i586.rpm&query=wine

wine-gecko >= 1.1.0 is needed by wine-1.3.32-1.1.i586

Well apparently wine-gecko needs wine, and wine needs wine-gecko.. so installing them together:

\rpm  -i wine-gecko-1.4-21.1.noarch.rpm wine-1.3.32-1.1.i586.rpm

\wine  explorer  /desktop=launcher.exe,1920x1080  ./launcher.exe

2010-08-19 ∞

After trying Allods Online – (2011 game) and Ryzom – (2004 game):

I’m really waiting for Star Wars: The Old Republic.

It seems really really polished, with a huge world and with a lot of excellent solo play. I have no clue what PvP or end-game would look like though, which has me worried.

Footnotes

1. was https://swtor.gamepedia.com/Star_Wars:_The_Old_Republic_Wiki [ ↩ ]