Carried

Who's actually the pet here?

I've never liked being carried in any MMO but this is exactly how I feel when I'm running any content in Star Wars The Old Republic with my companion that isn't a Heroic or a Flashpoint. It's rather like taking the killbot option in The Esseles, only worse because your companion is always with you unless you make the effort to get them to go away, and stay away.

(Even if I dismiss them they'll automatically return at the end of the next cutscene, unless I've sent them off on a crafting mission in which case they'll come back as soon as it's finished unless I'm in combat at the time, and even then they will, again, return at the end of the next cutscene.)

Running the regular content with no companion makes SWTOR feel like most MMOs - the odds are in my favor but I'm not invincible. I've racked up a dozen or so defeats on this character, about the same as the others, which isn't so surprising since this is a light armor support class and I'm intentionally undergeared. The Cartel Coins are just sitting there waiting to be spent on the 'hide headslot' unlock, but it's such a petty restriction and so obviously designed to annoy the player into the cash shop that I can't bring myself to be complicit with such crappy monetization practices.

Running with a companion, in contrast, is a complete waste of time. I have zero input - they all over-perform in exactly the same way - and when a 2.5 second cast doesn't go off because my companion killed my target in 1.5 seconds I start to wonder why I'm even there. Balancing the companions around two player content - as Bioware did when they made it so that anyone could solo the 2-man Heroics - has rendered a huge chunk of this game trivial to the point of irrelevance.

After 24 hours of this character I'm not finding the Consular story particularly engaging. It's poorly paced on Taris, and the "I'm confused... no, I'm not, i... I... I will kill you all!" dialogue of the corrupted Jedi is getting old fast. In fact the game itself started to wear out its welcome toward the end of this run. Taris is better than Coruscant - which isn't saying much - but as I leave the world behind me I'm in no hurry to ever see another rakghoul. This does not bode well for the likelihood of me starting off either of the other Republic classes any time soon.

SWTOR has massive issues - repetitive environments, boring enemies, non-existent balance, and a character build system that offers superficial choice but no depth whatsoever. For all that it remains a guilty pleasure and I daresay I'll come back to it eventually, but there's no question that the game is being carried by the story and by the Star Wars name.