Alternate titles for this post included A New Alt, The Alt Strikes Back, Return of the... well, you get the idea.
Alting - switching between multiple characters in MMOs (and between multiple MMOs) - is the main the reason this blog exists. Over the years my tendency to alt, and to reroll, has left me with an ever expanding roster of mostly low level characters, an encyclopedic knowledge of MMO starter zones, and only the vaguest idea of what other players of these games actually mean by endgame. So as far back as my first post in 24 Hours In... I set myself some new rules - one character per game, and one game per 24 hours of /played time.
(Also that I'd play any one game only once during each six game rotation, though I didn't formalise that rule until later.)
So far - except when I did a long run of Fallen Earth after that game's sunset was announced - I've only broken one of those rules. Inevitably it was the One Character Only rule, and equally inevitably it was in City of Heroes that I first did so. Perhaps equally inevitably the second game in which I've started an alt has been The Old Republic.
Not every MMO lends itself so readily to alting. For me there's three main factors involved - customisation, gameplay and linearity - and a fourth minor factor which I can best describe as convenience.
Offhand I would have said that customisation - in terms of a character's appearance - is what's most likely to send me back to the character creation screen again and again, but thinking about it that's not actually as true as it used to be. City of Heroes has legendarily inexhaustible options for how a character looks, even going so far as being able to alter the animations and visual effects of many individual powers, but I won't deny that these days I do lean rather heavily into a preferred silhouette, in that game and in others.* Specific details and colour schemes will vary, but I'm less inclined than I used to be to starting a new character just to try out a new look. SWTOR does reasonably well in this category, with a good selection of human and alien races to choose from and a good cosmetic gear system - even if the game itself doesn't always give much to work with. New gear options as random loot drops seem to become very rare after the starter worlds have been left behind. I had plenty of these on Korriban, but don't recall even one on Dromund Kaas.
*It's only recently that I consciously noticed how often I aim for an inverted triangular silhouette for my characters - shoulderpads up top, tight at the waist and slim boots below. It's a very '80s look. Also short hair, although that's partly due to most games not being very good at depicting long hair, which tends to resemble a large and inflexible hat more than it does actual hair.
Gameplay is a bigger factor - not just in how the game plays in general but in how each class plays differently from each other class.* I'll usually stick to one character per class (especially since many games now allow for multiple builds) unless it's City of Heroes, where certain combinations of primary and secondary powerset play so differently from others it's barely recognisable as the same class. SWTOR stumbles somewhat in this area, since while the names of the abilities are changed and the visual effects are different there's an awful lot of mirroring going on between the Republic and Imperial classes. That's by design - arguably lazy design, but design nonetheless.
Rather more seriously SWTOR doesn't so much stumble as it does fall flat on its face when it comes to the companions. The companion system has been gutted so thoroughly that they are, in gameplay terms, now nothing more than alternate skins applied to a single generic companion who can effortlessly fulfill any role. This remains - as I've said before - the single worst change ever made to this game. I have more meaningful input into the performance of my mount in Final Fantasy XIV than I do into the performance of my companions in SWTOR, and that's just sad.
*As a footnote on the subject of gameplay there's the unusual case of Neverwinter. Each class in that game does play differently, but although I've tested out a few others at one time or another the gameplay of my Rogue is so good it leaves me little interest in experiencing that game through any other class.
Then there's linearity. Simply put, the more strictly defined the levelling path is in a game the less likely I am to alt in it - there's only so many times even I can run the same zone without it becoming a chore. Again, City of Heroes does well here, not so much for the choice of zones - though that's fairly good on heroside at least - but for what I can do in these zones. There's almost always a wide range of different story arcs available, allowing me to avoid repeating the same content too often.
As is not unusual for this game SWTOR manages to handle this very well and very badly. The individual class storylines that run through the core 1-50 game are perhaps the best reason an MMO has ever given to play multiple characters. That this goes by the wayside in all of the post-launch content - narrowing to one storyline per faction and then to one storyline for everyone - is unfortunate but unavoidable. Sooner or later every MMO gives up on adding large chunks of content that only part of the playerbase will ever see.* It's only a question of when.
*City of Heroes went all in on co-op zones after the release of City of Villains. Sometimes there were separate stories for heroes and villains, but often there was only one, which often read like it was written solely with the good guys in mind.
The class stories in The Old Republic ensure that I will want to eventually play all eight of the game's classes. Of those eight I'm unlikely - even in the long term - to take more than one or two of them much beyond the original core game, but that doesn't detract from the quality of that 1-50 content, which guarantees that the experience of levelling up each class is unique... up to a point. The rest of the content - planetary stories and exploration missions - is linear, but the game offer a way around that.
The option to uncheck one box on the map screen and thus not even see the exploration missions is one that I remain conflicted about. Objectively I can look at it as SWTOR providing a tool that enables the player to do what they might well do anyway - that is skip the sidequests they've done before and don't actually need to do to stay on level for the main story. That's fine, and I'd probably think more kindly of this function if it wasn't the default setting. Exploration missions are something you have to opt into, and that willingness to encourage players - especially new players - to not play the game will always make me wince.
Aside from that there's actually a lot of good stuff in these sidequests - better writing and more interesting situations sometimes than in the main story. To give one recent example of this almost all of the background and story of the Dark Temple - the location of the last series of missions on Dromund Kaas - is contained within these optional missions. There's almost nothing to the Sith Warrior's specific class story there, and what there is includes an encounter that doesn't make much sense without the context provided by the side stories.
I can't see myself ever using this feature, not even on future characters, except perhaps as an experiment. I daresay there are side missions I will skip, but I'll pick and choose those that I decide to pass up on rather than ask the game to make those decisions for me. That I'll cheerfully skip a lot of the exploration missions on Coruscant on the next Republic character who goes there will have less to do with streamlining my levelling and more to do with Coruscant being extremely uninteresting.
Here at least SWTOR is an unalloyed success. While each character is limited to three crafting skill slots (once you've paid a trip to the cash shop to unlock the third...) all crafting materials gathered by a character go into a crafting inventory accessible to all of characters on the player's account. This is incredibly alt-friendly and very useful, seeing as much like Guild Wars 2 the mats go into the bank automatically, dont take up regular bank space, and can be accessed at any time and from any place. Some of this is fairly new - I can't say exactly when the changes were made but it wasn't this user-friendly when I last played this game in late '18 or early '19.
(It's enough for me to more or less forgive the fact that I can't queue up multiple 30 second long crafts on one companion, which makes the process of assembling a lot of small components rather clunky.)
Additionally player housing - aka Strongholds - is automatically accessible to every character on the same account, even those of the opposing faction. When I consider the number of times in the past I've went through the painful process of gathering signatures to set up solo guilds - resorting to out and out bribery if I had a character rich enough to fund the payouts - the ease with which my roster of characters in this game can share storage space (and transferable inventory) has been a very pleasant surprise.
Of all the MMOs I talk about in this blog it's The Old Republic that I'm most often critical of, and I stand by every disparaging word I've ever written about this game. Still, it does some things right, and these particular features make it more alt-friendly than most games. This is streamlining and simplification done right.
For once.
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