Revisiting Star Wars: The Old Republic

    If you've been wondering where I went for the last year or so, sans the occasional post and video every now and again, I've been enrolled in college. All of my time has been taken up by schoolwork, honors projects, and time at the gym. This left me with absolutely no time to request new games to review, to play the games I already have, or to really sit down and write a review. The largest break I've had up until now was a month-long stretch during the summer, and then it was right back to the grind.
    When my first semester started, I decided I should probably get a new computer, as the one I had been using for the last five years was starting to get slower and slower to do just about anything. Rather than just buying a new consumer-level PC, I opted to research getting a decent gaming laptop so I could have a good mobile recording station. Naturally, I haven't had a good chance to test it out in that capacity since I got it, but I've been able to bring some good gaming out of it in the minuscule bit of downtime I've had. One of the first things I figured I'd do is install the first game I played on the old eMachines rig I had and see how it fared on my new, roided-out rig. It'd be a great benchmark for the difference between the two systems. Considering that Star Wars: The Old Republic practically killed my old rig when it was new, so if I was able to get it running well on this new PC, then I'd be plenty happy. Given that my current PC is massively overpowered even now, ten-some months on down the line from when I purchased it, I figured I'd have absolutely no issue running this game at maximum settings, and for the most part, I was right. The very first thing I did after the game finished downloading, because even after AT&T upgraded my internet connection it still didn't want to download at anything resembling a reasonable speed was crank the graphical settings all the way up. For the most part, everything worked fine at first, but my keen gamer's eye started noticing a lot of issues. I started out as a Sith Juggernaut, because I played a Jedi Consular the last time I had this game and I remembered how much banal bitchwork I had to go through, so I picked the opposite end of the spectrum and decided to play against type for once. I was going to be a Machiavellian manipulator and merciless destroyer of worlds.

    As I traipsed around the starting planet, I started to notice a bunch of graphical issues. I'm almost certain there isn't a single curved line in this game. Everywhere a curve should be, it's either a blown-up texture that looks blurry, or a hard angled polygon that's probably supposed to be a curve, but clearly is not. Take a look at the hologram projector in the background of this screenshot, and the console to the right of my Jedi Consular. It's not like I went looking for these issues either, I wasn't playing in first-person mode and zooming in tight on a wall, this is something I noticed from the widest third-person camera angle available, and on the character-select screen as well. Every road, stairway, pathway and remotely curved object in the game is made up of obvious polygons. In addition to that, some of the textures in this game look like badly-sourced JPEG's, with obvious lossy compression artifacts that by all rights shouldn't be in a game like this.

    This particular texture to the left reminds me of some recycled textures I saw in some of the Resident Evil games on sixth-generation consoles where Capcom re-used a number of door textures from the G5 games upscaled and then recompressed. Some of these textures look like they were ripped from Knights of the Old Republic and re-used. Given how long this game takes to download on even decent internet connections, why do the textures look like overcompressed JPEG's? Some of the textures in this game look like the portrait sprites from Dragon Ball Z: Extreme Butoden. I see large, jagged edges surrounding any angled line with a drastic color shift between the line and the surrounding color. It sort of looks like what happens when someone's trying to photoshop an element into a picture that doesn't have a transparent background and screwed up the blending. Given a couple of minutes in Paint.net I could fix that without even needing access to the multi-layer master files, and without redrawing much of the texture.

    In addition to the texture issues, some of the Imperial officers have their ranking squares drawn onto the texture of their uniform, but others have them modeled onto their uniforms. Some of them even have both, like the characters weren't originally modeled with the ranking squares as part of their clothing, but had them added in later as some sort of graphical upgrade, but then someone forgot to edit the textures, leaving the old ones behind. The game was a good five years old when I got to it, and to my knowledge this issue hasn't been fixed, but then again in this game, you hardly ever visit the same planet and NPC's more than a few times, so for all I know they could have patched it out in the time since I've seen those NPC's. Not that that would have excused it being there in the first place. I know this is a massive game, but something this obvious should have shown up in testing, or during the process or creating the character models.
   The next big issue we see is the animations. I wouldn't be the critic I am if I didn't bash on about this for a while, considering the rather large amount of stick I gave the original Splinter Cell for its jerky animations several years back, and I'm going to have to give The Old Republic quite a bit of stick as well, because this game was released a good thirteen years after Metal Gear Solid and Ocarina of Time, and the animations look bloody dreadful. It's patently obvious that Bioware just uses a series of stock animations for every single character in the game regardless of body size or attire, which leads to situations where my Master's solid metal epaulets were stretching and warping like they were made from rubber, or where my character's beard clipped through the strap of one of the helmets I'd found, or the times when the lower section of my flight-helmet clipped through some box that was on the chest of my upper-body armor. The animations also have a rather irritating habit of being entirely screwed up by small things. In this game, you get a rather impressive selection of useless clothing which can be either sold off for cash or used to customize your companions and when I gave my Twi'lek girlfriend a nice hooded robe to wear, the hood clipped into her head-tails, sending the jiggle-physics into an absolute fit. They'd vibrate, but only when she was standing still. If she was moving, her head-tails would trail behind her without clipping into her clothing. I'm glad I didn't make a character with long hair because his ponytail probably would have kicked around like a snake someone had grabbed by the tail.
    To some extent, I hate to state the obvious, but most of the characters in this game have a serious case of the Bioware Face about them, failing to communicate much in the way of emotion unless it's exaggerated. Again, Metal Gear Solid and Ocarina of Time succeeded at this thirteen years prior, and neither of them nearly broke my computer to get running. Even without complex facial animation, both of those games were able to convey more emotion through far smoother motion than this game does. When it comes time for the characters to make expressions, they typically wind up looking a lot less natural than the facial-animations in Metal Gear Solid 2 did.

    Then there are the issues with pop-in. As I said before, I've got a beast of a computer, and I set the graphics settings to maximum, but that doesn't stop the game from forgetting to render textures to polygons, which usually happens whenever I get off the turbolift into my hanger. For a good several seconds after I enter the hanger, my ship won't appear until I get a few meters away. There was also a time when I was in the Abandoned Mine on Quesh, and most of the walls, some of the ground textures, and all of

the enemies and containers, generators and other stuff on the floor and walls, including a giant rock in the center of the cave didn't load up in the space of less than an in-game meter. This isn't Silent Hill and I'm not playing this on an original PlayStation, why does this game keep failing to load objects? The last game I played that had the kind of issues this game sometimes has was Alien: Isolation, and I was running that game on an Xbox 360. I have sixteen gigabytes of DDR4 RAM in this computer, paired with a GTX1050 GPU, and an Intel Seventh Generation 7700 quad-core CPU. This game came out six years before my PC was even built, and it still has these hiccups and even some slowdown at times, especially if the shadow resolution is set at anything resembling reasonable.

    Take a look at this screenshot of my Imperial Operative on the character-select screen. My Sith Juggernaut and my Jedi Consular have smoother shadows on them than she does. The shadows on her all look like a cloud of insects due to her attire. Her hair has a cloud of shadows on it, her tiara has one, and the curve of her jawline appears to cast a rather rough shadow as well. I don't really know what, either. I thought I'd reset the shadow resolution somewhat higher than the default was, but the smaller the shadow which is cast, the worse it looks. Not to mention the shadows cast on the skin of almost every character look like they were rendered in the late 1990's for a backdrop in a Resident Evil game, but for some reason, it looks even worse on the fair-skinned Operative than it did on my tanned Consular.

    After an update back in July of this year, I started to notice the single most pervasive issue of the time I've played this game. Diagonal screen-tearing. No, not your typical, run of the mill horizontal screen-tearing caused by typical v-sync issues, but diagonal screen-tearing. This issue wouldn't show up when I tried to take a screenshot, it wouldn't show up in the video I captured with OBS, so I had to take out my cellphone and take an old-fashioned camera-on-LCD screen video of it to get the picture I used to report the bug. Months on down the line, this issue hasn't been fixed. I've updated my graphics drivers, tried to force V-sync through the Nvidia control-panel, tried turning it off, nothing really seems to work except recording my screen with OBS throughout the entire game, and that's not something I really want to do, because lately, I don't have a whole lot to talk about, and that's the whole reason I'd even bother recording in the first place. Plus at this point, I've basically finished the game, so it wouldn't really go along with the other Let's Plays on my channel.
    Taking all of these issues into account, I can't really fathom why this game wouldn't run well on my old PC. The graphics at their best look like someone added better lighting to a Wii game, and at their worst look worse than the best-looking PS2 games, and my old PC was capable of running most PS2 and PSP games with a bunch of bells and whistles added. Considering the performance issues I saw even on this PC, I'd hate to think about what kind of computer one would need to run it with shadow resolution dialed all the way up. I keep coming back to games like Metal Gear Solid 2, or ever MGS3, MGS4, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Bioshock, there are so many games that came out before this one that had better graphics on far less capable systems, even games within the same franchise had better graphics. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed might not have been a sprawling MMORPG, but it looked way better back in 2008 than this did even in 2011. Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast might not have been entirely technically superior, but the graphical fidelity was at least more consistent than it is in this game, not to mention the fact that in 2002 it was graphically impressive as well. Even the original Mass Effect was better looking than this game is, even if the animations were a bit dodgy for a game not developed in the early 90's.
    But hey, graphics aren't all that make a game, so let's move on to the rest of the game, shall we? As I mentioned towards the beginning, I decided to play against type, opting for a brutal Sith Juggernaut character rather than my typical lawful good Paladin-esque choices, partially because I wanted to mess around with the Dark Side, but also because the character I created the played to my typical desires had a boring time of it. Fortunately, the Sith Juggernaut gets into action and political intrigue right off the bat. I was sent off to retrieve a lightsaber from a tomb, introduced to my first companion, told to bomb out some creatures, and kill my rival and former master within a short period of time from creating my character. I was even able to leave the starting world before the game was entirely done downloading. It was at this point where I decided to create a new character I could play to pass the time while the game finished downloading. Because I was on a roll with dark-side characters I decided to create an evil Jedi Knight, so I figured I'd go with a Jedi Sentinel and choose all the dark-side options I could. On my way to reaching level 15, I found out that the Jedi Sentinel plays identically to the Sith Juggernaut, save for the fact that the Sentinel uses two lightsabers instead of just one. I was somewhat disappointed that I'd rolled essentially the same character for the opposing faction, so I stopped playing my new character as soon as the game finished downloading and hopped onto my ship, but immediately before doing so, my Sith master sent me on a quest to whip a rogue Sith Lord named Darth Grathan into line by killing his son. So, with only my Twi'lek sidekick to back me up, I walked right into his house and promptly killed all of his guards. I then busted into his son's room and proceeded to smack the kid (Who couldn't be much younger than my character) around, subduing him effortlessly. His mother pleaded with me for her son's life, and struck up a deal. I could kill her husband and her son would put on his father's armor and mask and pretend to be his dad. Figuring this would be the actions of a Machiavellian Sith Lord who wished to rule the galaxy himself, I agreed to do so, acting under the impression that the mother and her son would be loyal to me afterward. I walked into Grathan's room, killed him, looted all his equipment off the dead body, tossed it to his son, and then proceeded to have sex with his now-single wife. Then, on my way to the spaceport, his son had the gall to send a single assassin after me, someone I took down after like three hits. Sonny boy, I walked into your compound with only a Twi'lek gunner at my back, slaughtered all of your guards, beat you up, killed your father and then fucked your mother. I'm your daddy now, bitch. You only live because of my good graces, so why don't you go fetch me a spiced ale while your mother and I make a worthy heir to the Grathan name? At least that's what I would have told him had the game allowed me to continue that quest-line after I beat the assassin. Sadly, the game didn't present that option to me. This is a trend which will continue throughout the entirety of the game. This game loves to railroad the player into doing what they've prepared for, and they don't like to create too many scenarios for side-quests. Most companion storylines happen off-screen, with the character you're talking to walking out of shot and the picture fading to black, then the picture fades back up on them walking back into shot after having done whatever they set out to do, typically without your involvement. One of the companion quests was all about my girlfriend reuniting with her friends and family from before she'd been taken as a slave, and for most of them, I was able to talk to her, go on a quest to a planet, find her old friends or family and help them out. I liked being able to walk into the dancing club where Vette's sister worked and act like I was there to be a dancer, it was fun. That all changed when we found her mother's corpse on Tattooine. She'd been worked to death in service of this scumbag Hutt, and by that point, I'd taken so many Light Side choices that the few Dark Side points I had were scrubbed out of existence. I'd made a reputation for myself as a champion of the innocent, basically the Star Wars version of The Shadow, and I wanted this Hutt's head for what he did to Vette's mother. Unfortunately, the game wasn't about to let me lead a charge into his palace for some reason, and would only send Vette and her sister Tivva into the place to kill him. On top of all of that, all of the dialogue options that presented themselves were grossly out of character for me, talking about savoring vengeance rather than preventing injustice if I were to support killing him, and talking about how killing is not the way despite my massive body-count if I were to support not killing him. Weirdly, killing him was presented as the Dark Side option despite the fact that if we let him live he'd be able to work more slaves to death. Killing him would clearly be the right thing to do, first off, and second, the explanation as to why Vette and Tivva had to go it alone was fucking flimsy at best. Apparently the Hutt had some security system and mercenaries set up, but at this point, I'd waded through crowds of Jedi Knights and Sith Lords, killing them all left and right, not to mention the millions of regular mooks I'd slaughtered. I even took on the False Emperor on my own and lived. I've survived every assassination attempt, even ones that got the drop on me without breaking a sweat, so there was no way I wasn't going to be able to take down some crime-lord as long as I had a Lightsaber and The Force by my side. Besides, at this point in time, I had a small fleet of starfighters at my disposal and a strike-force consisting of an ace pilot and hacker, a former black-ops agent, a prissy-ass kill-droid who seemed obsessed with repainting the inside of the ship every week, some cross between The Predator and an abominable snowman, and a former Jedi Knight who fought like Darth Maul, so between the eight of us and the laundry list of mercenaries, Sith Lords and Jedi Knights who owed me favors, I'm pretty sure we could have walked up to the palace mostly unobstructed, broken past the security, killed the Hutt and his protectors, freed the slaves, and repurposed the place into my Outer-Rim holiday home without breaking a sweat. Need I remind you that the assault on Lord Grathan's house was very similar in nature and took place on the starting planet? The mission seemed to call for subterfuge, but I wanted to make a damn statement to the planet, if not to the entire galaxy. Sadly, I was unable to as the game would not let me. Later on in the game, when Vette and I decided to get married, the entire thing happened off-screen. Normally you'd think that this would call for some celebration, maybe it would show us some interesting character moments with the crew, maybe they could have given any weight at all to this rather important character interaction. Even if all we got was one scene, anything would have been better than fading away as we walked off-screen and fading back as we returned. Where did we go? What did we do? I remember how tedious it was to plan for and play out the wedding in Story of Seasons, but I'd rather they completely overdo the wedding than not do anything at all. It's not like this was a secret or anything, god knows that this of all things isn't going to get me thrown out of the Empire, ao what the hell was the point of skipping this? Speaking of which, after a certain point in the game I acquired an apprentice/surrogate daughter figure named Jaesa Wilsaam, a former Jedi Knight who decided to join me after seeing how dark her fanatical Jedi master had become and how pure and kind I was. She decided to reach out to other Light-side Sith and try to recruit them to our side. In any other game, this might have been a massively important quest-line that involved subterfuge, bribery, spying on people, lies, and manipulation, but in this game, it happens entirely off-screen. A number of characters are introduced and subsequently killed-off without ever once being in danger of seeing them. Jaesa goes through an entire character-arc without us ever being there to experience it. Even if we had to play the whole mission as Jaesa and had to learn a whole new character for a bit it would still be better than not experiencing the storyline at all.
    Something else I thought I should mention as it was part of the main quest, I helped an Imperial officer named Malavai Quinn out, and he subsequently joined my party. Later on, after my master betrayed me, the way Sith tend to do, Quinn revealed himself to have been working for him this whole time, plotting my demise. Eventually, my master, Darth Baras told him to enact their plan, which involved luring me to an abandoned ship in the middle of nowhere, and siccing two giant robots on me that had supposedly been programmed around my combat data from every encounter I had in the game thus far. The way Quinn talked these things up, I was expecting a challenge, especially given the fact that I hit the F2P level-cap several months back by pure accident, but they were piss-easy. Hell, even the final boss of the initial quest-line was piss-easy. You'd think that Quinn would know enough about me to know that what he constructed wouldn't kill me, in fact given the ease at which I triumphed over them one would almost assume that Quinn had purposefully built them below-standard so as to not harm me, which is what I assumed and was why I allowed Quinn to continue to live, as any legitimate attempt to kill me probably wouldn't have started with a long confession and monologue in which I could have sensed his intentions, strangled him, and gotten the fuck out. Or maybe this game just isn't made very well.
    Speaking of which, when I got back to playing this game after the semester was over, the winter event was about to start, and when it did, everyone who talked to a certain vendor could get an infinite supply of snowballs that you can throw at almost everyone in the game, including certain NPC's. From that, you get packages which you can spend on holiday equipment. At the very top tier, costing 100 parcels was a sick-looking podracer, and ever since I figured out I could randomize what mount spawned when I clicked the button, I'd been collecting mounts whenever I possibly could. I figured out that, from a certain distance, one could toss snowballs at one's companion and then right-click the "snowflake" status-effect off of them, which meant that I could toss one at my companion and then remove the status effect in the time it took for the snowball to recharge. I spent a solid hour lobbing snowballs at my wife only to get four parcels. Four. It doesn't take fifteen minutes for the snowball to recharge, and I was lobbing them one right after another, clicking off the status effect.  It took me almost two solid weeks, running around a bar on Hutta throwing snowballs at the patrons before I was able to get my mount, and by the time I got it I was done. I was not about to spend any more time tossing snowballs around to try and get any more of this holiday gear. After a little while the parcels spawned a bit more often, but even after that, the RNG on them was still fucked up.
    Then there are a few other bugs, such as the time I spawned into a story-area with a force-field blocking off the path I needed to go, telling me I was not eligible for this instance, which took me reporting it to Bioware, logging out of the game, then back in, leaving the area in question and then returning to get it to work. None of which would have been a problem if the game would let you report bugs from within the client, but apparently that's reserved for subscribers. Also, check out how my companion was able to make it past the force-field, but I couldn't. They tend to do that.

    There was also the time on Hoth where I managed to find a section of the map that fell into a completely different area of the world map. Look at my minimap in the screenshot, then look at where I actually am in the game. This was the kind of problem you used to see in the old Final Fantasy games, where a certain section of the map would fall under different territory rules than the rest of the area due to a quirk of the programming, but here it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because they were working with far more advanced systems than Square was on the NES.

    At one point, I killed an enemy in the game that proceeded to drop a piece of equipment, but the corpse clipped through the terrain and I wasn't able to pick the drop up. It's a good thing this was only a green beacon and not a yellow one, because yellow beacons are quest items, and I would have had to leave the area, wait for the monsters to respawn, come back, and kill them again hoping that they wouldn't fall through the world-map again.

    There are a few force-fields with movement barriers several inches behind the actual force-field. Most of those force-fields I found were on the Vaiken Spacedock in the dropship hanger, but there were others throughout the game. Most of them were gold force-fields, but I found a few red ones that had the movement barriers only a few centimeters too far behind the graphical representation of the field and was only able to clip my character's head into the field and not walk my whole body behind it. Granted, it's a small thing, and I get that this is a very large game, but how did Bioware not find this out?

    There was also one time where my Lightsaber remained ignited while I was driving my speeder, which is a fairly common glitch in the game. There were a few times where I would click to interact with something, and my Lightsaber would remain ignited, clipping through my arm and my face while tinkering. Sometimes I'd go to use a screwdriver or something like it and the Lightsaber would remain in my hand, clipping through the piece of equipment I was supposed to be repairing.
    Speaking of Lightsabers, they sure seem to be a lot less effective in the game than they are in the movies. Sometimes I can ram my blade through something to destroy it, and sometimes I have to plant explosives on it instead. Sometimes to get past a locked door or force-field, I had to hack something, but other times I was able to just whack it with the Lightsaber. Then there's the fact that Lightsabers only ever seem to work properly in cutscenes, and in gameplay, they work like the police batons from Futurama. Even if you're fighting someone who also has a Lightsaber, the two of you just stand around whacking at each other until one of you falls over. Severed limbs only exist in cutscenes. There's no bisection, no decapitation, no real mauling, they just keel over and vanish into the ether like they've figured out how to become one with the Force regardless of if they're Jedi, Sith, animal, or an inorganic droid. The only time you get to cut off limbs in this game is in cutscenes. I know this is a T rated game, but considering a Lightsaber cauterizes the wounds it causes, and the highest any of the films in the series have been rated is PG-13. Anakin Skywalker got dismembered and burned alive in the third film after slicing up Count Dooku, killing hordes of children and choking his wife almost to death and while that film was definitely a hard PG-13, it wasn't exactly risking an R, and likewise this game wouldn't be risking an M rating. I have Jedi Outcast and The Force Unleashed II on the shelf right next to me, both of which had dismemberment as part of the combat features, and neither of those were rated M for Mature, despite the fact that the former game came out in an era where Perfect Dark was rated M and the GBC prequel was rated T, exclusively because the latter game had persistent corpses. Goldeneye on the Wii, released a decade later had way more blood, more realistic graphics, and a hell of a lot more violence, and it was only rated T for ages 13+. This game features coerced sex, the ability to psychologically break some of your companions into becoming masochistic sadists who get off on being fucking dominated in the way only a Force user without any personal restraints or standards can, you can Force-choke just about anyone in the game if you can interact with them, up to and including your love-interests as part of the aforementioned psychological torture one can accomplish as a pure Dark-side player, you can brainwash people, it's implied that certain NPC's who were slaves had been raped as a part of their forced servitude, one of the quest-lines I went on involved all of my friends being tortured until the time at which I brought the False Emperor to his knees and killed him, you can brainwash a living, feeling battle-droid into being a mindless soldier, you can sadistically kill loads of people, and, lest we forget,  you can walk into Lord Grathan's house, beat up his son, kill him, and then bone his wife while making your potential future wife watch as you do so. Why, when all of this can happen within the game did they skimp on the Lightsaber dismemberment? I get that this is an MMO, but the challenge to a Sith such as myself shouldn't lie in the number of times I have to whack a given target with my Lightsaber, but in whether or not I can actually land a decent hit on the target. If you need a big boss, then there are plenty of creatures that have Lightsaber resistance in Star Wars lore, and Mandalorian Iron, Cortosis fibers and Sith alchemy are all available to use to armor humanoid enemies and droids. I could come up with a dismemberment table that would work without a whole lot of effort. For instance, label each major skeletal group and polygon on the model, let's say head, torso, hips, left and right upper and lower arms, left and right hands and feet, left and right thighs, and left and right calves. From there, run a quick calculation after each attack is determined to hit to create a straight line from the Lightsaber's angle of attack through the polygons that make up the body, then detach the sections of the body the Lightsaber would slash through as the attack animation completes and have them fall to the ground. If the attack would decapitate the target or remove their last remaining arm, then the target should be dead. Maybe some living enemies could die if their torso and hips were separated by a blade, and others could continue to live if they were tough enough. Add an orange glow to severed metal and a burnt black tone to severed flesh and you're set. Half-Life had to use a ton of hacks to accomplish dismemberment, but they still did it. Even if what I'm laying down isn't feasible with current processing power, much less the processing available when this game was made, Mortal Kombat 4 achieved dismemberment in fatalities back in 1997, just remove all the blood and you've got a T-rated game. It's been a long time since the ESRB considered dismemberment an automatic M, and it was a long time since that time when this game started development and was released. Dismemberment is a staple of this whole franchise, why isn't it in what's probably the only Star Wars MMO modern fans and younger ones have any memory of? By most standards, I'm a latecomer to the series and I know that! I'm sure people younger than I am know that dismemberment is an important aspect of Star Wars. Speaking of which, whenever dismemberment happens in the cutscenes, the stumps are always just out of view of the camera, like Bioware didn't want to have to make different character models or something. In fact, despite the level of work that has obviously gone into making this game, it seems like Bioware didn't want to go the extra mile and put in the extra effort that would have made this game truly great. From the underpolished graphics, to the lackluster combat, to the obnoxious re-use of assets throughout the game, to the obvious lack of optimization, to the lack of decent interactivity in the companion storylines, to the railroading, to the fact character dialogue doesn't change depending on what all one has done up to that point in the story if one attempts an optional mission set after the main campaign. I was actually congratulated for killing someone before they even betrayed me! The game literally spoiled itself for me! A simple way to prevent me from finding this out early, if they weren't going to check through my save-file and see how far I'd gotten, would have been to lock off the False Emperor storyline until after I'd completed the main quest. It wouldn't have been particularly difficult to do, just set a flag to activate those quests on the Imperial Fleet after I beat Darth Baras.
    One of the most prolific issues with the game has to be the music. From the time I started playing this game last year until now, the musical cues are all over the place. Battle of the Heroes is used as loading-screen music, Duel of the Fates is glorified elevator music, since it only plays when you're arriving at or departing a destination in your spaceship, and Across the Stars is used in place of Binary Sunset. It's like someone at Lucasfilm handed Bioware a stack of soundtrack CD's and didn't tell them what songs were used where, and the guy who did the music arrangement had only ever seen the opening title crawls of the saga and that's why the only song that's actually used properly is the main-title theme.
    All in all, while this game can be a mess at times, it tends to be something of a fun mess at best, but if you decide that you want to deviate from the designated path, you'll be sorely disappointed. Sometimes the game looks pretty, but most of the time it looks like it was made to run on the Wii, or worse, the PS2. This game has no right to be taking up all of the resources it does for as absolutely bad as it looks. How is this game as old as it is and still chugging on my state-of-the-art laptop?
    In the end, this game is well worth the no money at all I paid for it, but if I'd been one of the people who bought it at launch or had paid a subscription fee for my time in the game, I'd be sorely disappointed, especially considering how much a subscription fee is and how little I paid for much better games comparatively.