SWTOR: The Edgeward Legacy

On Friday I watched a video about how Bioware anticipated SW:TOR’s Legacy System to work and it got me sort of intrigued. I love alts and a game that really acknowledged alts…well that caught my interest.

My “main” still hadn’t unlocked the Legacy system though. I knew I was relatively close since I’d heard you could unlock it at 30 and I was 31 or so. I just had to finish the first chapter of my class quest, so I decided to see if I could get that done. It took me about 8 hours over 3 days but this evening I got there.

It’s nice to have goals. I think part of the reason I drifted away from SW:TOR was because I didn’t have any good short-term goals to strive for. Also, I climbed out of my self-imposed OCD cage this weekend. I deleted all the Heroic Quests from my journal first of all. (There’s not enough people playing to bother trying to group. Saturday night there were 16 people on the world I was questing on). Then all the Flashpoint and PvP quests. Then all the gray quests. Then I started focusing on my class quests, only doing side quests that sort of fell along the path to my class quests.

The game was more fun because I felt like I was moving forward rather than doing endless dreary side quests that (since I was over-level for them) each gave me under-powered gear and a tiny whiff of experience. Talk about feeling like you’re spinning your wheels. There’s some decent story to the class quests, and enough mini-bosses to keep you on your toes. The side quests in SW:TOR are mostly…numbing.

So now I’ve created the Edgeward Legacy. Now what? I’m not sure. I need another goal. But now at least I can play my alts. Ever since I learned about Legacy Experience I’ve focused on just 1 character, which also added to my burnout. Bart The Trooper has great survivability but is dull as dirt to play after a while. Just about every non-boss battle goes the same since he has a couple of ‘builders’ to buff himself with. In order to prevent them from dropping I have to keep spamming those builders and by the time that’s all done the mob is dead. It gets pretty tedious after a few nights of playing like that.

It’s an odd thing, though. Even though the actual mechanics of playing are still not very fun, there’s something satisfying about completing quests and gaining levels and finally meeting the goal I’d set for myself.

I think SW:TOR would be a great F2P title for me. Once my sub runs out I don’t anticipate re-upping but if it was F2P I bet I’d pop in every few weeks for a Star Wars fix in the same way I do with Star Trek Online. I guess I’ve got a while to wait before Bioware takes it down that path, though.