Long time no see

It's been years since I was last on Nar Shaddaa.

Of the four characters I've started since adding Star Wars The Old Republic into my rotation, this is the first to reach Nar Shaddaa. My Trooper and my Warrior did all the side missions and the heroics on each of their worlds, and my Consular did a few less but stayed on Taris for the bonus series. This time I've taken even less detours along the way, and coming to the next planet on the itinerary I realized I remembered almost nothing about it.

I have ran this world before - pre-blog so at least five years ago and probably longer - but as far as I recall I've only completed it once, on an Imperial Agent who was my highest level character back then. This is my first time here on a Bounty Hunter.

This got me wondering how many runs of a zone it takes for it to really stick in my memory. It's not a question that comes to mind in most other MMOs because in those I'm sticking to one character and by now I'm far enough into those games that it's all new to me. There are exceptions: I've rerolled in Fallen Earth (by necessity) and Neverwinter (by choice) and I've put a lot of hours into both of those games both before I started this blog and since, so I know most of what's coming. It's also relevant to City of Heroes because I've been running multiple alts and, again, I've spent a lot of time in that game in the past.

And it's relevant to SWTOR. I've ran the starter worlds and the faction capitols multiple times and know them well, and aside from the specifics of some of the class stories I can now say much the same about Balmorra and Taris. Beyond that though it's either new to me or last played so long ago that it might as well be. Going into Nar Shaddaa all I remembered about it was that it was a pallette swapped Coruscant with more neon.

Comparisons with Coruscant are inevitable. Nar Shaddaa is certainly more colorful than the Republic capital, but outside of the Promenade hub area most of what makes this world visually interesting is happening in the skybox. At ground level it's the same old story from Coruscant - everywhere looks the same and nowhere looks like anywhere you would actually live. Even the mobs just stand around aimlessly in groups of three or four in a way that City of Heroes was making fun of in the Hollows years before SWTOR came out.

The planetary story arc here is really a series of short arcs that are only tenuously connected to one another. There's good character moments in the first and another callback to KOTOR in the third.

At the end, as on Balmora, there's a bonus series - though oddly it doesn't seem to be designated as such. This is mixed in with some repeatable missions and most of the planet's Heroics. Some of this is obvious filler but I guess the writers deserve some credit for coming up with so many different ways to say "go to the place, shoot the dudes, break their stuff."

There's a lot of travel time involved, and with Fast Travel priced to discourage (4K a pop - was it always this expensive?) it's time to break out the speeder bike. There's some fun to be had zipping along the corridors, though in places it's extremely hard to avoid drawing aggro and while I zoomed past some of this I was surprised at how often a single shot was able to knock me off my bike.