I dug out my Star Wars The Old Republic account earlier today for a bit of a nostalgia kick (thank you to the genuinely incredibly helpful EA customer support guy) and man, that game is really, really rough to go back to. I think my last time playing it was sometime in 2015? In my heart I’d like to make a couple of new characters and run through a couple of the class stories again but being confronted with the actual experience of playing that game in 2024 has made it very hard to imagine that process being very fun at all.
Part of it is that I am genuinely very good at mechanically similar video game Final Fantasy XIV. My true sicko days are for sure behind me, but I’m top of the DPS table in every duty that doesn’t have my sicko friends in it. The thing is though I play FFXIV on controller and I was never very good at SWTOR - I don’t know how to play this style of MMO effectively with mouse and keyboard and the idea of going from FFXIV to another GCD-juggler and being shit at it sounds infuriating. I don’t know where I’d even begin with setting up efficient, comfortable keyboard short cuts.
The other part is, how long does SWTOR have for this world, really? It’s a very old game at this point with two very cruel corporate masters. At what point, if I wanted to play it again, am I just better forgetting about it for now and waiting for the inevitable death and resurrection via private server?
I was surprised to find I still had a little bit of muscle memory left for my Sith Sorcerer’s rotation, or like, a facsimile of part of it at least. It’s still fun to shoot lightning and get procs that generate further lightning. So it has that going for it at the very least.
I think I remembered it as being a bigger part of my life than it was. I did the /ptime command on the character that was my main and it was roughly 21 days; my most played alt in FFXIV clocks in at around 26 days (by any reasonable standard both of these numbers are an absurd amount of time to spend with a video game). That’s not quite the full tale of the tape on SWTOR; I had an Imperial character I spent a comparable amount of time on and I did 7/8 of the class stories, but it’s still a useful comparison. In my head these are games that took up a comparable part of my life but looking back I was much more on-again-off-again with SWTOR. It was a game where I’d play a lot for about a month at a time, get into the rhythm of dailies and knock out one of the class stories and then not think about it for about a year at the time. I think the reason for this is pretty simple; it’s not very good. Still weird to realise just how much larger of a footprint FFXIV has had on my life though.
I think that, at the root of me poking at SWTOR a little is me wanting a new MMO to play. In terms of like, end game content I’m pretty happy with FFXIV at the minute; the time to re-level all my jobs part of the expansion is honesty always my favourite. But I’m craving novelty and the specific feeling of feeling lost and overwhelmed by all the systems that comes with starting a new MMO. You might be thinking it sounds like the hit game Final Fantasy XI is the solution to all your problems and well, yeah maybe it is.
SWTOR does have Huttball though and nobody can take that away from it.
I think the thing about swtor is that you get a cruddy game but 7 B-Tier BioWare storylines and the A+ imperial agent storyline.
