Trooper Log #0: Beta

I promised I’d start keeping a log of my activities from The Old Republic concerning my Trooper, so here we go…

Hooray, I got into beta!… and so did a lot of other people thanks to BioWare suddenly deciding to stress test their servers.

Warning: This entry DOES NOT contain spoilers of Star Wars: The Old Republic for the Trooper class, but Log #1 onward will and I’ll have a warning message like this at the start of every one.

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Computer Log

Both Jeff and Mav along with a lot of other folks I know got their beta invites in time for the to download the game completely and play as soon as the beta weekend period started. I, on the other hand, got my beta invite almost exactly when the weekend beta period started and had to wait for the game to download before I could play it… the wait was killing me and every second it spent downloading was another second I wasn’t in beta… though, for some of that time neither was Jeff and Mav. There were lots of server issues happening at the time so they lost a couple of hours desperately waiting for everything to start working properly, it was madness!

It took about 13 hours for me to download the game so I started playing after midnight (my time)… and played all the way through till about 10am… then I went to sleep for about 4 hours and continued playing the game from 2pm till around 2am… then I got a full 8 hours sleep and played the last hours of the beta weekend… I think I clocked up about 24hours worth of gameplay time out of it all… with a little rounding, I’m not exactly sure of the times, I was too busy playing, haha.

So what did I experience? Well, it was glorious! I can’t go into details, but I simply HAD to play as a Trooper for this beta even though I knew that’s the class I’d be using as my main when the game launches. I wanted to use this opportunity to sink my teeth into the game and work everything out, including the key assignments for my Logitech G13 Game Board and G700 Gaming Mouse. It took a few configurations and some working out, but I’ve come up with a great system with those two devices that works really well for me, so I’m set for launch in that area.

I also took some time to re-acquaint myself with all those wacky MMO mechanics seeing as my only experience was with LotRO awhile back and… I guess you could count Xenoblade Chronicles in a strange way. Most importantly, I wanted to learn the mechanics of what it is to be a Tank in games like this since that’s a class I never really did go for in the past. I think I’ve gotten the hang of managing aggro and making sure enemies are taken off-balance and can’t dish out as much damage as they want to. Of course, by the end of the weekend beta I just barely made it up to lv18 with my Trooper Vanguard, so there’s still a lot more to it which I have to discover.

Being a beta, there were some strange bugs to be had during the game. Some time was spent writing up feedback about various things in the game as we played through it and I’m sure most of these issues won’t be in the final launch build of the game. There is one bug that I found really funny though, I was randomly walking along with one of my companion characters, visiting the market of a space port with no enemies in sight on this planet I happened to be on… when all of a sudden the “we’re under attack!” music came on and my companion suddenly gets his weapon out and runs off into the distance. I stood there looking at him running off down the road ready to kill whatever he found and thought, “well fuck… he ran away.” …he did come back though… eventually.

There are some complaints to be had about the game, but the overall experience was great. Loved it so much… I enjoyed myself maybe a little too much at times. I really can’t wait to start the game and to also start the Trooper Log for this site… December 20 can’t come fast enough… though thankfully I’ll have The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword to keep me company on the 24th of this month.

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