The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

There's plenty of all three in Star Wars The Old Republic.

The Good

I've played a Bounty Hunter before, but never previously went further than Dromund Kaas. This time around I've enjoyed the class a lot more while following the three rules I set for this character.

1. Always follow through on a job.

2. If the target is wanted dead or alive, dead is better.

3. If possible, kill the client as well.

This has led me to take  some really mean spirited options that I've passed up on in the past and I've lost count of the number of times a conversation scene has ended with a blaster shot. It's not dissimilar to my experience on the Sith Warrior, except where she chews the scenery and goes all in on being Evil with a capital E, the Bounty Hunter is much more businesslike and her dry, understated ruthlessness just makes the mayhem more entertaining. The overall story arc is something of an excuse plot, but it has a lot of good moments along the way. As is usually the case in SWTOR, it's good to be bad.

The class is also fun to play and very nicely animated. Most of this game's flashier combat animations are reserved for the Jedi/Sith and I guess that's to be expected - there's only so many variations an animator can be expected to come up with on the theme of 'shoot gun at dude' - but the Bounty Hunter gets some attacks that make good use of the jump pack, and rocket punch and flame sweep in particular are so well done they wouldn't be out of place in City of Heroes. Switching between mainhand blaster attacks and offhand flame attacks is also very smooth.

(They also share something else in common with CoH, in that they look fantastic in motion but are very hard to capture in a screenshot.)

Combat, at least once I got to Nar Shaddaa, felt less unabalanced than it has in a long time. it's not that I'm particularly undergeared because while I've left my headslot empty I do have a reasonable amount of blue gear from the Heroics I've done. I don't follow SWTOR updates closely enough to know if anything has been altered recently but it certainly feels like it has. For one thing I haven't run into any mobs that were gray to me during this run. As I approached the end of the planet, level shifted to level 25, the enemies I encountered were also level 25, and for the first time since Hutta I've ran with my companion for something other than story sequences and Heroics. While that's certainly made it easier Mako hasn't been effortlessly wrecking everything in sight. I'm still going to criticize other aspects of the combat in the next section, but for once it also deserves a little praise. To reiterate what I said a few posts back, it's not that the level shifting in this game is bad, it's just that in most situations it gives the player a really unbalancing level advantage.

The Bad

 

I loathe my Great Hunt handler. Her country and western accent and mannerisms are so out of place I roll my eyes every time I need to talk to her, but fortunately this isn't often since she only shows up to spout exposition when I arrive on a new planet. With any luck I'll get the opportunity to shoot her before I'm done.

It also feels a bit weird that I had to steal my ship. Hey, Nem'ro, you're my sponsor - the least you could do is set me up with a nice ride.

Having said something positive about the combat in the last section I'll balance that out by saying that 'Strong' enemies remain a huge bore to grind down, the one use per fight restriction on medpacks and the ninety second cooldown on them is doubly excessive, and given the number of enemies with stun attacks the two minute cooldown on my one and only stunbreaker is pure and simply bad game design. Enemies who can CC should always be used sparingly because it's just not fun to play against, and having such a limited ability to counter it just makes it even more annoying.

There's also often little or no correlation between how important/dangerous an enemy is in the story/setting and how much of a threat they actually are in the game. On one mission on Nar Shaddaa I had more trouble dealing with the random grunts than I did with the Jedi Knights in the same location and It's not the only time something like this has happened. It's a poor showing for the elite warriors of the Republic. Perhaps, seeing as there's so many of them in this era, standards are lower.

The Ugly

I'm still amazed at how badly done the Bounty Hunter's opening scene is. BioWare actually updated all of these intros a few years ago, so there's no excuse for this.

More generally, the limited color pallettes used on each world do the visuals no favors. It's more than just that though - Sector One in Fallen Earth is one of my all-time favorite zones in any MMO and while it's almost entirely done in shades of sand, rock and rusty metal, each location has its own look and feel to it. SWTOR's environments, regardless of colors, are often extremely bland and the game suffers a lot from everywhere looking like everywhere else.

Speaking of the visuals... one odd side effect of the excellent attack animations of this class is that it draws attention to the way the game applies damage to enemies instantly, which can lead to them falling over before I actually 'hit' them.

But for all the unkind things I continue to say about SWTOR - all of them richly deserved - I've enjoyed this run. If it's extended over more days than usual that's only been because it's given me a lot to talk about.

I've went further on this character than in any of the previous three, so will this be the one I return to next time? The plot is thin but the character herself is a lot of fun, so I might come back to her sooner than later, and as the first of them to reach Nar Shaddaa it does fall to her to complete the bonus series, which I couldn't quite finish off before the end of the run. I'm not sure though. Due to being outside the Imperial heirarchy, the Bounty Hunter does often feel overly detached from the main story of each world, which is one thing that might dissuade me from letting her take point on my continued exploration of the game.

That aside, having now started off four of the game's classes I do find myself tempted to work on completing the set. Like I said, I was underwhelmed by the Bounty Hunter the last time but this has been a good run, which makes it tempting to put some time into other classes I haven't played for years to see if the same is true of any of them.