Shock Tactics

"Good luck.  The jungle beasts are fierce."

That line always makes me laugh.  It's said by an imperial officer outside the spaceport on Dromund Kaas, and the tone in which he says it makes it sound less like a warning of deadly danger and more like a disinterested observation that it looks like it might rain later.  I don't know if it's meant to be funny, but it is.

There's a lot of funny moments in The Old Republic - intentional and otherwise - and when it comes from the player character it's likely to be fall into one of three categories that all start with the letter S - snark, sarcasm or sociopathy,  Since I'm currently running a Sith Warrior it's perhaps no surprise that it's the last of these I'll mainly be discussing in this post.

Just as in the Mass Effect series the biggest laughs usually came from choosing renegade rather than paragon options, so in SWTOR it's mostly the dark side choices that deliver.  This is noticeable on the Republic side, but far more so on the Imperial side, and especially when playing as a Sith.  This has a lot to do with the way that the game portrays dark/evil acts.

(It's true that characters of either faction can go dark, light or anywhere in between, but when all is said and done the Empire - and especially the Sith - are the designated bad guys of this setting.  A 'good' Sith is an anomaly, whereas a 'bad' Sith is the norm.)

For a Republic character a dark side choice that has actual consequences will often be painted as expedient or ruthless, and will only ocassionally be played for laughs.  For the Imperials - again, mainly the Sith - this behaviour is second nature, and the game frequently softens the impact of these choices by framing them in a different way from similar actions by the other faction.  The Sith are so melodramatic and so cartoonishly evil that it's only rarely that their worst actions are portrayed in such a way that they can be taken seriously.

This feels like a deliberate choice by the writers, and all the more so because it's not unique to SWTOR.  The writing of the villain side of City of Heroes often uses the same tools of black humour and exageratedly sociopathic behaviour to make some of the worst villains of the Rogue Isles likeable (or at least entertaining) rather than despicable.  On rare ocassions it doesn't do so, which is one reason why Westin Phipps is such a memorable figure in that game.  Phipps is a genuinely horrible human being, and his actions aren't painted as anything other than what they are - spite and cruelty that comes uncomfortably closer to the evils of the real world than CoH usually ventures.  It's his sheer ordinariness that makes Phipps so disquieting, and in this he's very far removed from the moustache twirling megalomaniacs hamming it up over in The Old Republic.

However SWTOR does find itself in a somewhat different position from CoH, given that it has to put words directly into the mouths of the player characters and their companions, and give them actions to match those words.  At which point the question becomes how evil are we willing to let this character be? 

This isn't much of an issue on Korriban, which does the City of Villains thing of giving the player free reign to be as bad as they want to be by ensuring that they are almost always interacting only with other bad people.  Just about everyone the player encounters on the Sith starter world is either themselves evil or is the lackey of someone who is.  These guys are jerks, the game says, so go nuts because they probably deserve it anyway.  On the few ocassions when this isn't the case the scenes are steeped in melodrama or played for laughs.  Frequently both.

There's one massive exception to this rule though, even though it doesn't become fully apparent until after the player character leaves Korriban.  That exception is the initial companion of the Sith Warrior - Vette.

It's obvious that Vette is a favourite of the writers.  Similarities to Mission Vao from Knights of the Old Republic notwithstanding (she even has the same voice actor) this character gets a lot of screentime - more, I think, than any of the other initial companions.  Aric Jorgan was barely a presence in the class story moments on Coruscant and Taris, but Vette almost always has something to say.  That's good.  The companions are one of this game's unique selling points, and the more they are involved in the story the better.  The problem is that in the way her character and story play out Vette is a uniquely well conceived but peculiarly badly executed companion - at least she is if the Sith Warrior leans to the dark side.

Vette is a light side companion - that is to say one who will almost invariably react badly to dark side choices made by the player.  She's not unique in this - a few of the initial companions of other classes have similarly strong light or dark leanings that can make them an awkward match if the player character leans the other way - and really this isn't as much of a problem as it used to be as over time the system whereby companion influence is gained has been dumbed down (like everything else about them) and it's now basically impossible to not gain influence with them, even when making choices that they disapprove of.  However it remains a problem with Vette specifically, because there's one choice that has to be made or her personal story will never start.

Yes, I'm talking about taking off the shock collar.

Vette is first encountered on Korriban as a captive and slave of the Sith.  Once released into the custody of the player character she remains a slave and as such is wearing a shock collar.  From then on conversations with Vette frequently include options to use the shock collar.  It's a great way to rack up those dark side points.  Up to a point.  It's not that long before every one-on-one conversation with Vette turns into her asking for the shock collar to be removed, and if it isn't then this interaction becomes an unending loop.  The message is made very clear by the game - do the right thing and take the collar off or it's No Personal Story For You.

I can't speak with certainty having not run through every other class story, but so far as I'm aware this is the only instance in the core game where the player is locked out of the entirety of a companion's story until one very specific action is taken, and that feels like bad design, for several reasons.  Aside from anything else, for a predominantly (or fully) dark side Sith it's very out of character.

Perhaps the point being made here is that slavery is bad.  No kidding.  This is self evident to any civilised person in the 21st century, but SWTOR is, let's remember, set a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.  Assigning modern day attitudes and morality to a character who exists in an environment where they'd actually be unlikely to think and behave that way is a quick way to establish that the audience should identify with that character, and it's used a lot in fantasy and sci-fi (and in historical fiction) for that very reason.  It's effective, but that doesn't make it good writing.  At best it's lazy, and at worst it damages the believability of the character, the setting, or both.

(Jon Snow in Game of Thrones is a good example of what I mean by this.  His outsider status does give some justification to his attitudes differing from those of his peers, but it's still very noticeable that as the designated hero of the series he's anomalously modern in many ways.)

Besides, if slavery is such an anathema - and to be clear it is, and to be clearer still in this setting, to a Sith, it isn't - then that's something the game only remembers when it's convenient to do so.  As yet I've barely kicked the dust of Korriban off my boots on Dromund Kaas and I've already killed dozens of slaves on this planet, in addition to the dozens more I killed on the previous world, and Vette has been right there beside me, gunning them down with no compunction whatsoever.

Of course that's an example of the classic story/gameplay dissonance that's so common in games - especially in this genre.  Most MMO players would cheerfully massacre an entire roomful of Baby Yodas if there was XP and some shinies in it for them, so violently supressing a slave rebellion is nothing out of the ordinary.  More importantly the slaves aren't characterised - my only interaction with them is in combat - whereas Vette has a personality.  Perhaps too much personality, since at times it feels like the player character is a member of Vette's supporting cast rather than the other way around.

What makes this peculiar narrative roadblock feel even more unnecessary is that outwith the personal story there's little or no discernable impact on Vette's personality if the collar stays on.  This leads to a curious disconnect where Vette is more outgoing and friendly to the player character during class story sequences than she is in the personal story sequences.  Even the moments when the shock collar is used are almost always played for laughs - which, fidelity to dark side characterisation aside, is the best reason to keep it on.*  This is slapstick, not sadism, and as such it's hard to see how this became such a dealbreaker when it came to the character's personal story.

*This is also not about missing out on any romance subplot, seeing as my Sith is female and in the original 1-50 experience everyone is adamantly heterosexual.  The personal story was never going to get that personal.

Ultimately the whole business with the shock collar is mishandled because by introducing it the game sets up an unusual, even unique, character/companion dynamic and then almost immediately abandons any attempt to follow through on it.  It's hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that had they thought this through more thoroughly Bioware would have been better off not including this aspect of Vette's story in the first place, rather than painting themselves, and the narrative, into a corner.

I do wonder if this might have played out differently had the game been released more recently.  It's worth remembering that SWTOR launched in 2011, long before The Force Awakens returned Star Wars to the big screen, and even longer before the franchise took its first wary steps toward a more morally ambivalent tone with Rogue One.  It's quite possible there were any number of lines that couldn't be crossed then that perhaps could be now.

It would also have been easy enough to de-emphasise the collar simply by reducing the frequency with which the option to use it is given in conversations, or by playing it even more for laughs than it already is.  Alternately the decision to remove it could easily have been taken out of the player's control by making it something that would unavoidably happen at a certain point in the story.  Doing either of these things would have dealt with the problem that currently exists of this one detail hanging over every interaction with this character, and of her personal story being held hostage until the player finally bows to the demands of the writers to do it their way or pass up on that content.

As it is though, it does at least give one answer to the question I posed earlier - how evil are we willing to let this character be?  That answer being not very, if it affects a character we like.  The conflict between the dark side and the light side lies at the very core of SWTOR - both thematically and in the mechanics - but in this game the portrayal of these two sides of the Force is anything but balanced.