Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Legacy of The Old Republic!

It’s been a while since I’ve written about Star Wars: The Old Republic, but that’s not for lack of playing it. It has become for me a sort of “zone out” game, and during my vacation week it’s taken up a huge (kind of embarrassing) portion of my time. It has a familiar, almost too simple style of play, paired with a pleasant feedback loop and an endgame aimed at allowing players to continue to participate in the game is pretty much any way they like. It’s polished, polished, polished to a fine sheen, but I’ve said that before and other people who have invested more time in the end game of SWTOR are better equipped to discuss it (at present my /played time on my only maxed out character is a paltry 7 days, less than half of what my end-game invested friend has put into SWTOR at this point).

What I do want to write about, because it’s sort of singular and incredible, is the Legacy system.

The Legacy system was advertised as “a way to allow players to construct relationships between their characters and generate their own fiction within the Star Wars Universe.” It is, of course, not really this at all, but it’s been packaged as such so you could be excused for believing that it is some sort of spontaneous family tree generator.

There are definitely parts of family-tree generator stuck on there. You can drag around faces and tie together family members. You can marry two characters or establish an improbable mother figure for a character or father figure or just say that you adopted another character. And all of your characters, after you choose your Legacy, will have the same last name. So for the love of god, choose your Legacy name with care. I don’t need to see a bunch of the Colehausersucks family fighting for the freedom of Balmora or whatever. It’s just not something I want in my Star Wars experience.

But mostly this familial relationship thing is pretty de-coupled from gameplay. Marrying characters doesn’t disqualify you from romancing other characters, and the Legacy system even allows for same sex relationships (which are woefully absent from SWTOR’s story/crew segments – I still really want to see my Sith and Vette hook up). So in a sense we’re looking at a more progressive, totally ineffectual move towards making SWTOR a more grown up place for us all to play. Thanks Bioware!

I shouldn’t be facetious, because Bioware did do something incredible with the Legacy system: they added an imbedded series of end game money sink content for some players who spend lots of time grinding, and they added a wonderful way to make each new character generation easier than the last. Because the Legacy system doesn’t just let you drag things around and make a story no one else will hear (or understand if you try to tell them about it) that ties your characters together or spend scads of time and money to make some of your global cooldowns slightly quicker. The Legacy system also gives you some amazing shit.

First and foremost, there’s the buff sharing between Legacy characters. This means every character in your Legacy who has completed chapter 2 of their main story shares their buff with all other characters in your Legacy group. If you complete it with a Sith Warrior, any of your characters who use their normal buff will, in addition to their standard effect, get the Sith Warrior’s damage boost effect. This makes replaying the game considerably easier since, as every nerd knows, 5% is actually a pretty huge bonus when you come right down to it.

This also means there’s a good reason to max out each and every kind of character, beyond just seeing the story unfold. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love the story. But the fact that there’s a real, positive feedback loop for exposing yourself to other parts of the story is a stroke of genius. The fact that each story play through gets easier, since you’ll now have access to a bevy of buffs and funds from other characters, is icing on the cake.

You’ll also acquire, along the way, “Legacy weapon components.” For a bundle of credits and some other stuff you can trade these pieces in for new, pretty nice gear at some vendors in Faction areas. This keeps you from having to rely on random drops for crucial pieces of gear at various times, and it gives you a nice incentive, as if the other Legacy bonuses didn’t, to play through different characters, since your acquisition of these Legacy components is tied to progress on your main class’ storyline.

And then there are the abilities. Through your Legacy tree you’ll unlock abilities, after clearing your entire class storyline, that other classes can use. Most of these aren’t so great: they can only be accessed when you’re using a Heroic Moment ability, which is a pretty slim window, and most of them, while useful, are abilities that are traditionally spammed for most classes. Still, it’s a nice touch, and these abilities are not parallel between Imperial and Republic characters, so there’s a real reason to go out of your way and max out characters from both sides, though it’s not much of one, I’ll admit.

I’ve just now realized I’ve essentially reconstituted copy for SWTOR’s website, and I don’t actually have a lot to say about the whole Legacy system, spare: wow. Not for the way it tries to get players to invent their own fiction, something players have never needed encouragement to do at any point ever in the past, ever. Not for the way it gives players access to a new kind of equipment which, I have to be honest, I’ve never seen used ever. But for the fact that it encourages players to explore every element of the game, and that it makes it easier and easier to do so and rewards those players for taking their exploration to its conclusion. There aren’t rewards for going halfway in the Legacy system (only two-thirds of the way), so in order to get anything out of playing a given class you really have to learn it, get to know its mechanics, strengths and weaknesses. I’ve been playing a Powertech for the last few weeks and loving it, and whenever I switch back to my Marauder to play endgame content with friends my brain shifts with an audible clunk.

But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Because I’ve seen the end-game of a lot of MMOs, games like Ultima Online that abstractly capped players out and set them loose in the world to amazing effect, games like World of Warcraft that allowed their endgame to become essentially a second job and then refined their system, bit by bit, to give managers a little bit less to do. I’ve seen the end-game of Asheron’s Call, where tedious bullshit became even more tedious and the end-game was less a real end-game and more of a glacial pace switch paired with regularly administered server events that high-level players could try to ruin. But I’ve never seen an end-game that encouraged players to start at the beginning again and did it quite so well. And in a sense, that’s what Star Wars has always been about: building something, looking at it and then tearing it down to start over.

Kudos, Bioware, for hitting the nail on the head.