SWTOR: Ravanel on Nightmare Lands

Shouldn't that be "Ravanel in the Nightmare Lands"? Nope. Nightmare Lands is a server name in Star Wars, and specifically, it is the server I was told to transfer to from Frostclaw. It is also a great name, because the Nightmare lands are situated on the Wookie planet Kashyyyk (I love those three 'y's'), which was one of my favorite planets in the game Knights of the Old Republic. Am I not a bit late with tranferring? Hasn't everyone done that already? Nope again. I got an e-mail just a few days ago telling me that I was "available for transfer", so they apparently organized a second wave of server transfers. Now the good thing was that I was already feeling like a veteran at server transfers because I had been reading so much about it on other blogs. So we quite professionally ran off to quickly create some placeholder characters on our new server to assure our names weren't taken. I was really happy when I found mine were all still available. I really can't imagine what I would've done if "Ravanel" would've been taken: it's my most used character name that feels the most like 'me'. My boyfriend was less lucky, I think he had to rename two of his nine characters, but I guess that could've been a lot worse.

When I transferred Ravanel and had to pick a legacy name, I found that Griffon was already taken. All workable options, such as Griffin, Gryphon etc were also already taken. So I had to settle for "Gryffin". It sounds as if I really didn't know how to spell "Griffon", aargh. I'm Griffon, not Gryffin!

I suppose I'll get used to it... Eventually... At least there was still some kind of same-looking name available.

When transferred, I felt like a little girl who walks into a big town for the first time of her life. There were so many people on! I might also have felt a bit lost because my friends have stopped playing SWTOR, including most of my old kinnies from LotRO who tried out the game for a while. My boyfriend and I are almost level 50 now and already have a guild in mind to apply to. I hope we find a good home soon, because playing on your own in an MMO feels a bit lonely. I also can't wait to explore end-game! Exciting times are ahead.

Gosh - it's a tablet!

I got a tablet for my birthday! I feel so spoiled. I've always been a bit annoyed by scans of drawings ending up with a bad quality, no matter how good your scanner is. Black-in-white is okay, I guess, but it becomes a problem as soon as any drawings include colours. They just never get it right. So of course I was jealous when I saw what others (like Xhii from Roll one hundred) made on their computer, and not only because they're just amazing at drawing stuff (which they are). With a tablet, you are able to draw on a touchscreen with a fake pencil, and everything you draw ends up right on your screen.

I'm not really sure why I got this present. I didn't really ask for it, nor do I think I'm 'good enough' to use it. I'm not a designer, I just draw for the fun of it. I really must have sounded very enthusiastic about it in the past. Either way, the thing was there, so it had to be tried out. So I drew something random that turned out to be the girl with the giraffe neck above. No, don't ask me about the neck. It was not intentional. I was just trying to find out how the damn thing worked!

The first thing I found out, was that the line quality was very poor in the usual program I use for adjusting pictures (GIMP). It did look great in Photoshop, though, but I had never used that program before. So I had to try out two new things at a time.

Techy nerd stuff

What I liked:

• Written and drawn lines by pen look great. You don't really have to do anything for it. It only looks great in Photoshop, though, it looks terrible in GIMP.
• Changing between writing and erasing is quick and works really well. You can just turn your pencil around to switch between the two. In Photoshop it even saves the size of your pencil versus your eraser so you don't have to change that manually each time.
• Layers in Photoshop work very intuitive. Just felt it made sense. Apart from me starting to draw in the background instead of opening a new layer first. Lets not talk about that!

What I didn't like:

• Mostly never-have-been-using Photoshop stuff, like:
• If I want to draw a line, I don't get to see a "preview line" as you do in GIMP, so it's impossible to create parallel lines.
• I don't know how to select an already existing colour within the drawing you already have opened - pretty crucial for doing anything that involves colour (this is easy in GIMP).
• I can't find a "bucket fill" tool (also easy in GIMP).
• Searching the internet for specific tools doesn't get me any further.
• Trying to draw without looking at my hand feels like needing a third brain half that I lack. It's just so damn hard! It's like: "Hey, congratulations with your new tablet. You know what, you'll get a free time travel trip with it, how does that sound? Use it and you'll be torpedoed back ten years in the past and can draw with the skill you had back then. Have fun!" Aargh.
• The pen pressure (how thick/dark your line gets) is done very well, and it's a marvel of science that it works at all, but doing the same thing on real paper is still so much easier. On the picture on top of this post, the left sketch in turquoise was actually the easiest to draw. As soon as I tried to make it 'perfect' it was starting to get hard, and I had to use tools to get it to work.

Help

This was all a bit more complicated than I had hoped, so I'll need some outside sources to help me understand these tools, and then especially how to use different sorts of lines and colours. Luckily I found a blog called Idrawdigital, with some interesting posts, such as:

• Tutorial: Wacom tablet
• Drawing the female figure (no more giraffes)

If you have any other tips or know of helpful websites, please let me know. It's hard to find a place to start.

This is my Wacom bamboo tablet, by the way (picture not by myself). It looks amazing with my silver iMac! -------------------------------------->

On a more positive note: it will be quite a while before I get anything done that doesn't make your eyes bleed, so don't worry, the next few posts of the coming half year will be all about LotRO and SWTOR again!

ME 3: Shepard, Geth and Quarians

 

Mass Effect. So much fun to play, but so hard to write blog posts about. There are many things to talk about, but I also feel that I shouldn't spoil too much for people who haven't played it (this far) yet - a conflicting combination. One thing that urges me to post about Mass Effect after all are the nice character pictures you can take. The game has beautiful colours, scenery and portraits from time to time. I think the shot of badass-looking Shepard & co above contains all three!

This time some shots of my time at and around Rannoch, homeworld of the Quarians. I had been both dreading and looking forward to this moment. Looking forward because there has been a distinct lack of Tali in Mass Effect 3 thus far, and dreading because I had a feeling the absence of both the Geth and Quarians in the war against the Reapers was not just a coincidence. A who has to clean up the mess? Right. Shepard.

   

Artificial lifeforms: evil, risky or lovely?

One of the largest revelations of Mass Effect 2 was that the main force of the Geth were never aggressive towards "organics", but that it were in fact the Reapers who convinced a splinter group of the Geth to believe otherwise. But how to tell this to the Quarians, who's total nomad culture encircles around their past exile by the Geth and their idea of the conscious AI as an dangerous and evil entity?

The Geth form a prelude to some of the bigger pictures behind Mass Effect, initiating questions like: Can artificial intelligent beings be considered lifeforms of themselves? And if so: 

Are Artificial Intelligent lifeforms destructive against organic lifeforms by nature?

These are not new questions, but themes that have already been explored through a lot of mediums. I'm sure you're familiar with the countless movies that answer the above question with "yes" (especially the ones involving the destruction of Earth). I can also see parallels between the Matrix and Mass Effect's Reapers harvesting alien life cycles. There are, however, also thoughtful movies that answer the question with "no", and one I came to think of is A.I. by Steven Spielberg. This excellent movie tells the story of a young boy who turns out to be an A.I. and gets abandoned by his human 'parents'. The inevitable question: who is more human, the little boy or 'real' people?

Mass Effect lets you decide on your own what your views on this are, although they do give you certain leads in the form of EDI, your ship's A.I. who develops an identity, and Legion (picture above), the highly developed Geth that can operate on itself (unlike most other Geth) and can follow you into combat. I choose the more positive approach, so my Shepard believes that organic and artificial lifeforms can co-exist, as long as they respects each other as a living being. 

Happy ending

Thus on Rannoch, I established a peace between the Geth and the Quarians, and the Quarians were able to set foot on their homeworld for the first time in centuries. In my opinion, the Quarians were extremely lucky that the Geth were less frightful and more forgiving than themselves, as the Geth already consciously neglected several opportunities to destroy the Quarians altogether. It also struck me as quite painful that there were Quarians defending the first Geth in the Morning War. So many missed chances, it could all have been so much less painful... 

Of course, the way I describe all this must make it sound all very simple and straightforward, but it actually feels very intuitive and realistic in-game. It was a really cool theme and I'm happy to have brought it to a good end.

And wow, I've never seen Tali so happy! The picture above also shows one of the rare moments that even Shepard actually looks happy - previous attempts to smiling looked more like grinning while enduring dental pains. They just set foot to Rannoch and are daydreaming about the Quarians building it up again. Could you think of a happier ending to this story? I certainly cannot.

I sincerely wonder if there even are people who keep being anti-Geth in their first playthrough and choose to eliminate them. Let me know if you did, because that would be fascinating to hear about.

SWTOR: Overly attached companion, part II

In retrospect, I think this says it all:

From: Star Trek: The Original Series, Season 1: "Arena".

SWTOR: Overly attached companion

For those of you for which the title doesn't ring a bell: you might want to check out Reddit (warning: high risk on addictive side-effects). Anyway, perhaps I really have too much imagination, but I nearly got a heart attack when I saw Qyzen grinning at me like this!

I'm not overly fond of Qyzen and usually refer to him as my 'green monster'. He just keeps on talking about points and kills... it was fun at first, but he soon started to bore me to death. When finishing the Tython storyline on my jedi consular (soon-to-be shadow) Delanee, Qyzen suddenly became overly attached:

"I will follow, Herald. Wherever needed. Scorekeeper has shown path: to serve her Herald."

At this point, I always get a strong urge to say "No, thanks!", but no, all I get to choose between is:

• You do me honor, Qyzen.
• Then, thank you.
• I like the sound of this.

... and it always ends the same, with me running around with a green monster troddling behind me. Sigh.

LOTRO: My hideous appearance

When I logged in the other day in the festival area, a distinct lack of festival NPC's caught my eye. I had missed the last day of the festival, aargh! I almost had enough tokens to get the beautiful new festival dress when I logged off the evening before, but now I'll have to wait another year to get it. I'm absolutely terrible at remembering such things as festival dates. Sigh.

Fashion show

I didn't know much to do as there was no raid planned and not many people on, so I logged my warg to check something out that I had initially missed: the creeps had also gotten cosmetics with the Anniversary Festival, in the form of special skins! Here some I tried out:

From left to right: Black Moria Uruk Appearance (Blackarrow), Shak-hai Smith Appearance (Blackarrow), Corpulent Orc Appearance (Reaver) and Drake masked Gangling Appearance (Defiler). Click here for a larger image. I might add more pictures later.

How does it work?

Depending on how old your account is, you get a certain amount of Tokens of Dedication:

• less than a year: no tokens
• 1-2 years: 1 token
• 3-4 years: 2 tokens
• 5 years: 3 tokens

There is a skin available for 1 token and one for 2 tokens. My account is 4 years old, so that meant I could choose between either the cheap or the more expensive skin, but I could not get them both. I got my boyfriend to roll a creep, try a skin, and then reroll the same class to try the other skin. He doesn't play his creeps seriously anyway, so he had not done anything on them yet and didn't care to delete and recreate. The result was a great fashion show of which the mannequins would cause Charles Worth to turn in his grave.

Creepy names

Somehow I'm a lore-addict on freep side, but as soon as I'm on creep side I don't really care anymore (sorry, creeps!). Sure, you can name your creep something terrifying in Black Speech, but I'm fine too with horrible puns. Thus I created a spider called "Ravenomous" and eventually settled for the dark purple skin (picture below) because it looked, well, more er... 'venomous' than the other. Also, I've already seen a lot of people run around with the pretty epic hairy one (picture above), and it's a bit boring to look the same as everyone else.

Creeping around

After doing the introduction quests on my new spider (sweet commendations!), I spent the rest of the evening sneaking around in a warg pack with my tribe mates. It was great fun! I'm rank 3 and still feel extremely squishy, but it's not as bad as it used to be. Not sure if my rank 0 boyfriend warg agrees, but let's keep it at that. It's funny how being stealthed is still bugged: instead of half look-through we are all totally look-through, even while in the same fellowship. We therefore marked each other so we could at least know where everyone was. I love sneaking around in a group, it's so much fun, especially when chatting on Vent! 

I choose the Twisted Warg skin from the Tower of Orthanc Acid trash (picture below, left warg) - gosh those things totally freak me out when I'm raiding! It's getting better now we don't wipe on every trash pull anymore, but those three yellow staring eyes are still pretty creepy. Below my boyfriend and I at our most common spot of residence (sigh) yesterday: see how totally disgusting I look! Why oh why didn't I take that beautiful tiger-like skin my boyfriend took? I guess I hope everyone is as much of a whimp as I am. I myself would certainly totally freak out if I would get sneaked upon by a warg looking like myself.

SWTOR: We are the Voss. We are right.

Last time, I wrote about how beautiful Voss was and how much I enjoyed running around there. I was thrilled by the setup of the planet: the Republic and the Empire quarreling to get the support of the Voss, a people with a mysterious, closed culture that prefer to stick to themselves. It is said that Voss prophets are always right and their whole culture is based upon this belief. Voss will walk to their death without hesitation if a prophet would tell them this would save more lives in the future. Even the Republic diplomats and the Jedi you speak to seem to believe the Voss can foretell the future. Being connected to the force, it is indeed possible they receive such foretelling visions, albeit in another form than the Jedi do. Are Voss indeed always right? This mystery fed my imagination and made me curious as to what was going to happen on this planet. This smelled like an opportunity for an exciting storyline.

Several levels further (my sage Ravanel is now level 48) I'm disappointed. This could have been an exciting story: can the Voss misinterpret their visions, like the Jedi council sometimes does? And if so, is this covered up to ensure the continuation of the Voss culture with their blind belief in their prophets? If the Voss would indeed always be right, how come their life is not perfect? And why are they so self centered? Instead, the air of superiority and blindstaring when speaking to the Voss ("I have seen this, so it must be true") is starting to annoy me. There were some unorthodox quests, such as one wherein you participate in a Voss ritual and walk through a vision (picture to the right). This could've been an interesting test full of puzzles, but instead it was just more creatures to kill. Voss turned out to be more of the same, most quests involving planting/deactivating devices, killing dangerous adversaries and mostly many, many mobs. None of the above questions were answered in the storyline: so far Voss has only proved to be yet another planet on which I have to spread goodwill for the Republic. When I started playing Star Wars, I was very impressed by the storylines, the voice acting and the nice closeup shots. However, the longer I play it, the more I recognize the same questing patterns repeated over and over. Slowly the questing experience is turning into a grind.

Perhaps I shouldn't think about this too much. Perhaps I should just level like everyone else, mindlessly killing mobs on a steady pace and spacebarring through conversations. The real question is: to what cause? Okay, that might have sounded too depressing, especially for me. I still like this game and its world, I'm just a bit done with leveling. I really hope I'll find some fun when I reach end-game. We shall see soon.