[Editor's Note: Anthony "Kellmorn" Sproson is back with his weekly editorial and henceforth the column will be called "Tea, Top Hats & TOR." You see, Kellmorn is a British fellow based in the U.K. and would feel naked discussing the game without a pot of tea on the boil and a topper on his noggin. Right, lad. Away you go!]
A common problem exists amongst all the MMO
TORWars Podcast #152: The Terrors of Nuturing the SWTOR Community
The argument about being a soldier doesn’t carry any weight for me. Sure, the average soldier is expected to wear the uniform and walk, eat, and sleep in step with the rest of his unit. The problem is that our characters are not, strictly speaking, a part of that monolith. Armies do not give soldiers their own ships. They do not allow their soldiers to run off to do whatever the soldier feels like doing, when he feels like doing it.
At best you could view the characters as troubleshooters or contractors. That may not make the best sense – especially for troopers – but it’s better than being some kind of official Soldier Gone Rampant.
So, do I think it should be possible to customize armor? Absolutely. It’s a big galactic mess out there. Do you think the guy paying you the big bucks is going to care about results or whether you’re wearing your regulation tighty whities?
I really don’t mind being “an individual among clones” up to a point. Obviously if everyone wore the EXACT same armor as me it would get old fast. I also think end-game gear should more be on the line of Satele Shan/Darth Malgus gear. Something that says, hey I’m a Sith Lord not a regular soldier. But up until that point, I think it makes sense that we look similar. The trailers show masses of troopers, Sith Warriors, and Jedi all looking similar. It looks badass.
That being said, more customization is never a bad thing. I’d like it if they put it in, but I’m not going to lose sleep over it if they don’t.
I also loathe finding “clones” in MMOs. One of the reasons why I picked a bald, male, gnome for my main character in WoW. Still, I ran into several clones.
But if you think about it, we don’t have to stand out amongst millions: only on our individual servers, which if specced like other MMORPGs have populations of a few tens of thousands, which makes things loads easier.
Personally, I don’t need my character to stand out all that much: the most important thing to me is that *I* like him or her. For example, I want a male rattataki bounty hunter like the one sitting in a cantina on a screenshot in the holonet on the official page.
It’d be fun if we could have an article where TORWARS staff and regulars post pics of their mains, a few days into the launch
Haha i’d be up for that! Although you can view my Jedi Knight character here already: http://paganrites.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/dark-and-light-clash.jpg
To Grinstone: It’s a double edged sword, to me there is no doubt that in the game there will be moments when you are part of that monolith to have big epic battles – i think DE and others have stated that somewhere – but for the majority you will more or less be running and gunning solo. But even then, for your specific class, you’ll be surrounded by like looking people for a lot of the time due to NPC designs.
And the only real way to differentiate will be armoring, but we all know what that’s like after a weeks! I think the best way to differentiate is really just mixing then finding a unusual colored chest piece to then color the rest of your armor in that fashion. But overall, i don’t really mind being an individual amongst clones, given the setting and so on i think it will actually make sense for once and really produce some realistic moments that will kick major ass.
I’ll hold you to that