The Old Republic - Reflecting on the Inquisitor

Article by Randy May

Let me start off by saying that this is less of a review and more of a reflection.  I've been playing Bioware's MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) for several months now and I only recently got my first character to the level cap.  I'm partial to single player games but because I'm such a fan of the Star Wars mythos, I couldn't help but be excited to take part.

I realize that the game has been out now for months.  Hundreds of reviews have already been written, scores have been given, and people have generally made up their minds about what they think.  So I apologize for being so late to the game (no pun intended), but like I said, this isn't a review but a reflection, more specifically a reflection on one of the game's many stories.

BEWARE! The rest of this article contains SPOILERS.

The class I chose to play as was the Sith Inquistor (think Darth Sidious).  The race I chose was a Sith.  Now for those of you that don't know the difference between a Sith and Sith, click here.  If you read the article or already know anything about the foundations of the early Sith empire you'll know that it enslaved the Sith species and took their name.  It just so happens that the Sith inquisitor begins his story as a slave. But of course this slave is different.  Because of his sensitivity to the force, he is chosen to take part in a gauntlet of sorts, a chance to earn his freedom by showing that he can master the ways of the force.

As a matter of personal taste, I like to role play a little with my characters in games like this.  Because SWTOR in particular puts a lot of emphasis on decision making, I decided to create a moral backstory on which I would base the decisions I made.  For the most part, this backstory was fairly basic.  I was a slave so I myself would sympathize with those whose power and freedom had been stripped from them.  I would see the Empire as a necessary evil, something with which I could gain power but would ultimately need to be reformed.  Finally, I would have no tolerance for those in power who would take advantage of those weaker than themselves  Coincidentally, these are things that were already a part of the story and my role playing fit in nicely.

After much time spent proving himself, my fledgling inquisitor becomes the apprentice to Darth Zash, a master consumed with ancient Sith rituals of power.  As is the Sith way, the fight for power sees Zash betray her apprentice but failing to do so leaves her essence imprisoned in the body of an alien.  It's complicated but not important.  What is important is where to the story goes from here.  Darth Thanaton, recently made a member of the Dark Council, sees my inquisitor as a threat and sends his lackeys to make short work of me.  But my inquisitor escapes and seeks complete one of his old master's rituals, one that will make him powerful enough to defeat Thanaton and take his place amongst the greatest of Sith.

If you've seen the classic Star Wars trilogy you'll know that it's possible for Jedi to live on after death in a sort of ghostly form.  The same goes for the Sith but it is a much more torturous existence.  The ritual that my inquisitor seeks to perform involves taking the power of these "force ghosts" by entrapping them in his own body.  None of these ghosts come willingly but eventually four are enslaved with the promise of their freedom once the deed of killing Thanaton was done.  Yes, that's right. Enslaved.  But we'll get to that later.

Along the way, I found myself making excuses for the power I was gaining so quickly and the means by which I was acquiring it.  For the most part the companions that traveled with me were supportive of my goals.  All except one.  A young female Jedi named Ashara.  Joining me out of necessity rather than choice, she walks the line between peace and chaos, always struggling with her personal beliefs of the Jedi, their code, the Sith empire, and more importantly my inquisitor who claims to have ambitions of reforming the Sith way.  She constantly calls my motives and means into question, forcing me to think about my actions.  Unfortunately, my inquisitor is manipulative, a quality he has gained along with his newly found powers, and soon convinces not only Ashara but himself that what he is doing is good and that his ends justify the means.

In the end Thanaton falls to the power my inquisitor has harnessed from the enslaved force ghosts and I take my place as a new member of the Dark Council.  I'm finally in a place of power, a place where I can change the Empire like I said I would.  But there is still the matter of the force ghosts.  They appear to me, demanding that I make good on my promise to free them.  I weigh my options.  I ask the ghosts if they would find peace.  They say no.  They say the because of my actions I too will face the same torturous fate as them.  With this is mind, the only choice that makes sense is to take advantage of the power I have while I still have time left to use it.

I chose to use the ring for "good."

I denied them their freedom and immediately I understood what this decision meant.  This inquisitor who was once a slave, who once fought for those whose freedom had been stripped from them had just done the very thing he swore he would fight against.  The irony sunk in pretty quickly.  As tragic as this ending is, it was fitting.  His lust for power had cost him his soul, a fate suffered by so many others before him.  The dark side had consumed him.  It had deceived him into thinking he was in control, when really, he had begun losing it the moment he chose to enslave those weaker than himself.  Denying their promised freedom only sealed his fate.

I was very taken with this story.  I'll admit, its presentation was not very good.  The game's art style and choppy cinematics did not lend to the story's dark tone and tragic theme.  But as it came to a close, my personal experience with this character was more important than any of the game's shortcomings.  I'm sure that others came away with a very different interpretation of this story.  Maybe they decided to truly be good, to follow the light side of the force rather than succumb to the dark side.  Either way, it's a testament to the writers.  They took a dry and in many ways dying genre and breathed a bit of life back into it.

Episode 7 - Spoilers & Memories

If you check the podcast feed on the right side of this page, you'll notice that Episode 7 - Spoilers & Memories is out now! You can find it here or through the iTunes store.

Episode 5 - The Dark Knight Rises Review

If you check the podcast feed on the right side of this page, you'll notice that Episode 5 - The Dark Knight Rises Review is out now! You can find it here or through the iTunes store.

This week features the hosts of Post-Credit Podcast as cohorts in a lengthy discussion and review of The Dark Knight Rises. Other topics this week include a Bane poster stuck in a trash can, turning our world into Skyrim, and more!

Episode 4 Release

If you didn't notice the updated RSS feed linked on the right side of our page, The Bard Next Door Episode 4 - Faith in Secular Media is now up. You can find it here or on the iTunes store.

 

In this week's episode, Randy, Dan, and guest Jesse Doland discuss non-religious films that still affect their own faiths. Other topics include Tiny Wings 2, Michelle Rodriguez being awesome at Comic-Con, Oz the Great and Powerful, a balding man that might be Jeff Daniels, and more!

Review: Outwitters

Review by Daniel Nenadovic

One Man Left gained quite the reputation from its iOS release of Tilt to Live, which exemplified the principle of being easy to learn but difficult to master with incredibly simple tilt controls and addictive action gameplay. Despite having almost no barrier to entry for even the most casual of gamers, Tilt to Live develops into a complex and strategic experience rather quickly even as it maintains its fast pace. 

Outwitters is an entirely different genre and pace of game. It's an asynchronous multiplayer turn-based strategy game accompanied by charming cartoon visuals on iOS. And it once again exemplifies that crucial element of being simple on the surface but opening into wide possibilities.

Check out the trailer right here or in the inexplicably small viewing window below (I really do need to work on figuring out how to make videos appear larger on Blogger).

Before I go any further, know this: you need to try this game out if you enjoy turn-based strategy at all. It's free, and the good kind of free, too. Download it here. 

What's so great about this, then? To start, many games that are advertised as free are heavily restricted until you pay money, but Outwitters is free in the best sense. You pay nothing, download the game, and are presented with no advertisements. You get one of the game's factions, the Scallywags, to play for free against any and all opponents. The Scallywags are at least on par with the two factions that you can unlock for money. Each faction is only differentiated by its own visual style and a unique special unit. The free Scallywags, for instance, can build the Bombshell, a slow-moving artillery critter.

And you can enjoy the game with the Scallywags entirely for free. It's awesome and there's not really any need to put any money into this game if you don't want to. If you find yourself enjoying it enough that you want to expand your strategic options just a tad and play with a different set of visuals, then you can unlock either the Adorables (think cute stuffed animals) or the Feedback (robots) for $1.99 each. Alternatively, you can purchase the Uber Pack for $2.99, which includes both the Adorables and the Feedback AND any other future teams that One Man Left releases for the game. A bit of a steal, that one, though these are limited-time release sale prices, so I'm not sure what they'll be once the sale is over.

The game is either local pass-n-play or online asynchronous multiplayer-only, which might be a turn-off for some, but there are a wide range of players diving in right now so even complete strategy newbs should settle into a competitive niche. You'll win some, you'll lose some, and that's just the nature of the beast when you're dealing with a large multiplayer pool. The asynchronous multiplayer works well for the most part, but it does have some inherent problems which I'll dive into later on.

Outwitters' central mechanic is Wit. Wit is your resource for everything in the game. If you want to build a unit, you need to spend Wit. If you want to move, you need to spend Wit. If you want to attack, you need to spend Wit. Special abilities? Yup, spend Wit. However, you only get so many Wit points per turn. Even when you increase your Wit generation by capturing neutral spots on the game board, you're only gaining a few Wit points of advantage over your opponent. 

Wit can be saved for future use in between turns, but that's easier than it sounds most of the time. You will NEVER have enough Wit to do everything that you need to do, which means that you're going to have to prioritize very carefully. Wit adds just enough to the standard turn-based strategy game to freshen the genre up perfectly.

Your goal is to destroy your opponents' headquarters, and to do this you'll generally employ five different units shared between all factions (though each faction's version looks unique). There's the Runner, a frail but fast unit best employed for recon and precision strikes on weak targets. Vision and tactical precision are both incredibly important aspects of Outwitters, so don't underestimate the cheap scout. The Soldier is a balanced option with a bit of everything at an effective price, sturdier and packing more of a punch than the Runner but slower and pricier. Medics are fragile but can heal and boost your other units to greater feats. Snipers are pricy, fragile, and terribly slow, but are also capable of dealing quite a bit of damage from long range. The last core unit, the Heavy, is a pricy, slow, very healthy beefstick that dishes out as much damage as the Sniper but at close range.

Those core units present a very delicate game. Your most powerful options are also usually your most vulnerable ones. That holds true with the special unit for each faction as well. Every one of them is relatively fragile, but is also capable of entirely changing the course of a game on its own.

It's turn-based strategy beauty incarnate, and the game's cartoon aesthetic presents a charming counterbalance to the intense thought that will go into every move you make in an effort to utterly annihilate, say, an army of teddy bears and pink elephants (if you're fighting the Adorables). The music is also wonderful, with an entirely whacky and upbeat vibe that helps pull the entire strange experience together into undeniable awesomeness.

There are some problems with the game, and some of them are significant. It's had some problems with notifying you when it's your turn with push notifications, so it's not a bad idea to load Outwitters up to check your games list just in case somebody is waiting on you to submit your turn. Considering that the very idea of using push notifications for asynchronous multiplayer is to eliminate that guess work, that the system is currently experiencing difficulties is a shame. The developers have already put a good deal of work into fixing the push notifications issues and hopefully they'll keep going until there are none.

The game also crashes sometimes on my iPhone when I load it up or load up one of my games in progress, though it has never crashed for me in the middle of actually playing. This is definitely frustrating but happens infrequently.

The last problem is one that is inherent to asynchronous multiplayer: you have to wait for your turn. So the game plays out at a slow pace even when you're involved in multiple sessions. And losing players frequently won't bother to surrender or finish the losing game out, so you'll be stuck waiting seven days four days for an auto-victory to flag and clear that game from your list. It's a minor problem considering that you can have many games going at once, but some may find it an annoyance nonetheless. 

EDIT: While I was typing this review up, One Man Left patched the 'auto-forfeit due to inaction' time down to 4 days, which should help alleviate the above problem with Outwitters. Yay!

Hopefully these problems will be worked out rather quickly. Given One Man Left's track record with Tilt to Live and their consistent communication through Outwitters' news system, I don't doubt that any issues will be alleviated swiftly.

And again, the game is largely fantastic. It is the most fun I have had with a multiplayer game in a long time, and it is the good kind of free to play. Download it now.

Review: The Walking Dead Episode 2: Starved For Help

Review by Daniel Nenadovic

Last week on my own personal blog, Geek Media Musings, I reviewed Telltale's The Walking Dead Episode 1: A New Day and found the game to be refreshingly good after the release of their incredibly disappointing Jurassic Park game. The Walking Dead was more of a talky decisions game than a zombie action one, but I appreciated that considering the gravity surrounding those decisions. Life and death were in your hands, and your choices were usually sacrificing one person or resource to save another.

While Episode 1 was about surviving the initial impact of a zombie event, Episode 2 picks up three months after the first and your group seems to have settled into some sort of relatively-safe life in a barricaded motel. Except that you're running out of food. The gang has been on strict rations, and everybody is hungry. In fact, today it's your job to distribute the last few pieces of food to the group, but you don't have nearly enough to feed everybody.

So who do you feed? Perhaps more important, through your decisions, who don't you feed?

These are the moments where Telltale's game shines. There are no obvious answers, no real sense of right or wrong. Every last person in your camp is starving and each deserves food. The old man, the hunting buddy, the children, the markswoman, the guy who always has your back, and all the others. Who you feed now may have consequences later today. I applied a simple moral code that I carry in the real world: children first, elderly second, women, and then men. So some of the women and all of the fit men in my group went hungry that day, despite the fact that said fit men were pulling the most weight by way of their bodies being the most useful tools.

Others might approach that situation entirely different, and while I might believe them morally wrong in some way if they starved the children or something, the game isn't going to say that they've made the wrong decision, and indeed, their groups may fare better than mine did in a practical sense.

While zombies are present in Episode 2: Starved for Help, the meat of this particular episode is the question of how you treat your fellow human beings during dire situations. This question is implied in almost every decision you make this time around, and they are some heavy decisions.

As I said in my review of Episode 1, my hope was that Telltale would continue to provide the player with interesting and heavy decisions, and instead Starved for Help considerably improves that aspect of the game with consistent tension and weight. On the technical side of things, the game's audio sounded better than Episode I and its visuals looked just as good.

My one quibble comes with some of the action events that pop up from time to time. They're carried out through simple QTE and are not hard to achieve, but they can jump up on you when you settle into the slow and talky pace of the game. In particular, one of them took me completely by surprise this round and I was faced with an instant reload. While these can be fun and their presence keeps tension together, they are often inconsistent with the pace of the rest of the game. Luckily, failing them never punishes you too badly as the game will simply reload you to just before the action event that lead to your death in the first place. But then, that itself can also break atmosphere and tone. 

Still, that's a small problem in light of everything that The Walking Dead Game does right. If you're looking for a game set in the post-apoc setting that hinges upon big decisions with no shoe-horned correct answer, I really can't recommend this enough. I already regret some of the decisions that I made, and these are decisions that I made in a video game. That said video game can move me so speaks volumes to its quality.

The Walking Dead Telltale Game Series is available for purchase as the entire season on Steam and through Telltale's site for PC, but keep in mind that you're buying the whole season without immediate access to the last three episodes of said season, each of which will release individually over the next few months. If you'd like to purchase the game on an episode-by-episode basis, I believe that those are available for console on the Xbox Live Marketplace and the PSN Store.

Episode 2 Release

If you didn't notice the updated RSS feed linked on the right side of our page, The Bard Next Door Episode 2 - Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut Part 2 is now up. You can find it here or on the iTunes store.

Topics covered this week include The Newsroom, The Walking Dead The Game, Valve's reputation for awesomeness, and more! Listen in and let us know what you think!