Too much, too soon (II)

Something unexpected happened during a fight with some Imperial soldiers in the separatist base on Ord Mantell – I noticed my health bar was going down fast, and by the time I thought to delve into my inventory for one of the dozen or more health packs I'd never used up until then I was dead.

This came as a surprise to me. SWTOR – for reasons I'm about to go into – is not a hard game, even by the standards of modern MMOs. What had happened, I realised, was that I'd been level shifted from 12 to 10 – in other words I was on level for the area of Ord Mantell I was in, for the first time since the first levels of the game.

I was surprised. I was pleased. I was even impressed. Had the devs made changes in order to fix one of the problems with the pace of levelling in the game?

Well, no. Not really.

Levelling in SWTOR is really broken, in that progression is balanced around the expectation that the player does not want to play about half of the game. I wish I was joking about that but I'm not. There's two types of quests in SWTOR, and in the eyes of the devs they are not of equal value.

Firstly there's the class story quests/planetary quests – these (especially the class stories) are the game putting its unique selling point on full display, with lots of conversations, cutscenes and moral choices. In other words if SWTOR is Mass Effect via World of Warcraft (and it is) then this is the Mass Effect part of the game.

Then there's what's called the exploration missions. Unlike the class stories these are available to every character, and they're a mix of side stories, local colour and kill 10 whatever quests.

(There's also Heroics, but for this discussion they may as well be grouped in with exploration missions in that they're distinctly optional.)

Here's the problem – some time ago the devs* decided to make it possible to level up by doing nothing but the class and planetary stories, and raised the xp rewards of those quests accordingly. So now anyone who does do the class story quests and the planetary story quests and the exploration missions will level like a rocket, out-levelling the content they're doing almost immediately and never getting in sync again.

To illustrate this here's where I am right now. By the time I arrived on Coruscant, the next world after Ord Mantell, I was level 17. Coruscant starts at level 10 and ends at level 15 – I've out-levelled the entire world before I've so much as stepped off the shuttle. It's not a slight out-levelling either – the first enemies I encountered in Coruscant were grey.

SWTOR offers a couple of potential solutions to this (entirely self inflicted) problem. The first is to not do the exploration missions. There's a little box on the map screen which, if unchecked, will hide all of the exploration missions – on the map, on the mini-map and in the world. The default setting of this box is unchecked, so this is the preferred option or even how the game is meant to be experienced. You have to opt-in to half the content in the game... and that's just sad.

Sure, there's a fair amount of filler in the exploration missions, but there's also some genuinely interesting and entertaining side-stories. Moreover if these missions aren't in play then there's going to be some fairly long stretches of nothing much other than grinding through mobs on the way to wherever the next stage of the class/planetary story takes place. Since I'm going to be shooting these goons anyway shouldn't I at least know something about who they are and why I'm shooting them? That's information I'm mainly getting from the side-quests.

I can see the argument for skipping exploration missions on a second character, but doing so on the first character is going to deliver an abridged version of each world that's less interesting, less immersive and only marginally faster paced.

The other attempt at balancing out the levelling speed is level shifting, which I mentioned at the start of this post. In theory this is a better way of handling out-of-sync levelling, but the max level set for each world is way too high. I thought briefly that the devs had fixed the problem, and on Ord Mantell they more or less have, but the fix doesn't extend to Coruscant. As I said I've been over level for this world since the moment I arrived, and that's with the level shift.

This isn't the first time I've ran into this - it's not even the first time recently, and to be honest it's not quite the issue it would be in some other MMOs. I've been running solo since I arrived on Coruscant, and sending my companion away on crafting missions is a way to even up the combat odds that keep things if not exactly interesting then at least not deadeningly dull. Combat has never been SWTOR's main selling point, but the out-of-sync levelling does mean that the story content has to do even more of the heavy lifting in terms of keeping the player engaged than is usual for a Bioware game.

And that's a lot.

*I find when being critical I'm often saying 'the devs' rather than 'Bioware'. It's not that SWTOR isn't, in many ways, a monument to Bioware's total lack of understanding of the entire MMORPG genre – it absolutely is. It's just that post-Andromeda, post-Anthem it feels too much like kicking them when they're not only already down but in the process of bleeding out.