Flat City

"This is Coruscant. Your life shouldn't be in danger just because you step off the elevator on the wrong level."

It's only a throwaway comment from a minor NPC, but I really like that line. It's absolutely fitting that someone who lives in a city comprised mostly of gigantic multi-level structures would phrase it like that, rather than say 'if you walk down the wrong alley'.

Except in SWTOR's depiction of Coruscant this verticality is more of an informed attribute than something you actually experience for yourself. Sure, you'll see the towers during the quick travel taxi rides, and there are plenty of sheer drops to fall from if you're really careless, but the layout of the sectors you visit does almost nothing with the vertical axis. Coruscant is as two dimensional as the levels of the original Doom. Like that game it gives the impression of changes in heights by way of ramps and elevator platforms, but also like that game nothing is actually on top of anything else. I don't hold that against Doom – after all it was released way back in 1993 – but what's SWTOR's excuse?

Coruscant is flat in other senses of the word as well. With a few exceptions, such as the Gree ambassador droids, the mission givers aren't as vividly written as those on Ord Mantell, and the missions they hand out aren't as interesting.* The enemy factions of the Migrant Merchants' Guild and the Black Sun are interchangeable non-entities who appear to have nothing to do except hang around in groups of four waiting to be shot at, and they are everywhere, with a new combat encounter every few steps. They'd be tiresome to grind through if they didn't die so fast.

This is a recurring feature of SWTOR – things that are bad about the game being cancelled out not by things that are good but by other things that are equally bad. So the mobs are boring to fight and there's far too many of them, but on the upside the level shifting is so unbalanced those same mobs are utterly ineffectual and take no time at all to defeat.  Or the way in which SWTOR notoriously made additional hotbars a cash shop item when the game went F2P, but there's so much bloat in the combat skills that you don't actually need additional hotbars because half of those skills go unused.

*Perhaps it's due to being in the run-up to the 2020 elections but I'm finding the senators of Coruscant and their smarmy aides even more insufferable than I usually do.

The environments in which all this nothing takes place are bland and uninteresting – docks and streets that all look the same and which, again, do nothing interesting with the city-the-size-of-a-planet setting.

What is striking about Coruscant is how the vistas that do give any sense of the place and any sense of scale go mostly unseen. They are there, but they're almost invariably high above the default camera position, and the layout of the districts does nothing to show any of it off. This means you won't see any of it unless you stop and look for it, because at street level it's all just the same old corridors.

Things do pick up, slightly, in the territory of the Justicars (though the environments are just as bland) and in the maintenance tunnels, but only very slightly, and all through the world it feels mostly disconnected from the Trooper story. This isn't unusual for SWTOR, which often gives the impression that each world was designed with only one or two of the class stories in mind, and the rest were levered awkwardly in as an afterthought. That's really noticeable, for example, as a Bounty Hunter on Dromund Kaas.

As is probably clear by now I don't like Coruscant. It's a whirlpool of mediocrity into which every character on the Republic side is inexorably sucked after the more carefully crafted starter worlds, and the lack of diversity in environments and enemies means it seems to go on forever.