A Call and Response




The past year I have been looking for an MMO that filled the abyss that Star Wars: The Old Republic left in my heart when I slowly stopped playing all those years ago. I stopped playing maybe 3 years ago, but somehow it feels like a few months ago, and a decade ago at the same time. But I wasn't playing the game a decade ago when it released, I was late to the party on that one. I didn't start playing SWtor until I think 2013? I have the 'Test Pilot' title so sometime before late 2013 for sure.

Before I go on a tangent about all the rad things I did back in my SWtor prime, here are some thoughts on the other MMOs I tried out this past year.


RuneScape 3

Oh boy was I glad to try this game again. I still have my childhood account that some stranger gave to me something like 13 years ago. It is still the good old RuneScape I remember but with A LOT of customization which, if you didn't know, is a HUGE selling point for me in any game. When I was tiny boy of just 12 years old, I would do I don't know what in this game. The stats were the exact same as when the account was given to me, I never enjoyed grinding which was odd because that was all this game was back in the day. But somehow I spent hundreds of hours socialising and wearing adamant armour because I could never afford rune, which again, was because I didn't enjoy grinding. 

However, this game has grown A WHOLE LOT since back then, and there are so many armour and clothing options! I ended up making this cool winged knight armour set with some currency I didn't know how I got besides my account having sitting there forever and racking them up while I was gone I guess?? I did the grinding on stats I never did as a kid, but the game never clicked the same way it did back then, so onto the next game!


Final Fantasy 14, A Realm Reborn

This one was a tonne of fun. I'm not the biggest Final Fantasy fan, I've only ever played the first one on an old flip phone, and the 3D remake of the third on the Nintendo DS which is my favourite one. I dabbled in a bit of Final Fantasy 13 but couldn't get past an enemy in the ice zone early on and gave up. 

However, this game kept my attention for a good while. I played in the character creator a lot before deciding to scrap all of that and I bought the Moogle headpiece from the online store and put it on a Lalafell and said my character was a big Moogle. I also wore this rad armour set that looked 2 sizes too big on him and had a sword and shield as a paladin. He was the coolest Moogle in town, no doubt about that. But in the end, I was playing alone. I waited for the Oceanic servers to release but my interest in the game had waned by then and I was trying something else.


World of Warcraft

This is one I had tried before also, but I couldn't focus on anything because it is A LOT of text, and I am not good at reading large blocks of text. So this is really my second attempt at WoW. 

I played two characters. My first was a Demon Hunter who I grinded specific quests to dress up as a wandering Ronin type character with dual-wield katanas, right big, left small for the added style points. The class's abilities even matched the character with all of the dash-like abilities! 

My second character I had to earn. As my Ronin character I finished the Battle For Azeroth content and did a lot of grinding live on my Twitch stream to earn the allied race, Kul Tiran! I made them as a warrior and ended up transmoging a rad outfit that almost matched one of my old SWtor characters sets that I earned with the PvP currency! Speaking of, I mostly focused on PvP but also as a birthday gift a friend gifted me the expansion and I have slowly been whittling through that story too. But the PvP is where it's at for me in this game. Even though I had my cool outfit, the transmogrification mechanic in WoW isn't as good as it sound. Your selection of gear is limited by your classes gear type which locks you out of what feels like three quarters of the clothing options. That is WAY too little dressups options to feed my MMO dressups needs.


Star Wars: The Old Republic

And here I am, back at my old homestead. So much has changed since I played. My peak was probably from 2014 to 2018 I think? I am very bad at dates and all of it kind of just crumples into a 3 time slots; before I played SWtor, when I played SWtor, and after I played SWtor. However, I have a lot of fond memories playing the game on my own in the early days. Making friends on Tumblr which lead to joining a guild, which lead to making our own guild! Which lead to Mandalorian Roleplay! Which lead to PvP because so man of the Mando RPers would test their skills in PvP. But over time friends stopped playing and there wasn't much for me to do there anymore.

Cut to about a week ago. I download the game again. This time I am going to start fresh. The two classes I could never get down before were either stealth classes, or the Powertech, and because I played on the Imperial side before, this time I will play that class but on the Republic side. A few months before I redownloaded the game, they released the combat styles update which let your character choose from any of 16 advanced classes split into two groups, Force and Tech. Luckily for me all my progress from back in the day allowed me to jump start my new character. So I ended up making a trooper Vanguard to experience my old flame again, but with a new twist.

I said earlier that I have never had a knack for grinding, and that goes for SWtor too. With the cartel coins that had racked up from using the security key app for SWtor, I was able to purchase a level 70 character token and start pretty much from where I left off, right before the Onslaught expansion.


And with that rambley spiel I will get back to the game. I don't know what's in store for this blog, but I look forward to telling my old stories from a galaxy far far away, and even new ones I make from now on. I'm sure I've got enough material to go through eventually.



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