Star Wars: The Old Republic has changed for me again. I’m not talking about the latest update, the impact of which remains to be seen for me. That’s exciting, but I’m so far behind on content that it’ll be a long while before I’m actively participating in it. No, what I’ve recently started doing is, after reaching a point where I’m more or less happy with how I’ve progressed in PvP, begun to micromanage my gear. In SW:TOR, this is a game all to itself.
See, here’s the deal. I’m just not well-geared enough to run the Operations where the best gear drops, the “Campaign” gear that represents the pinnacle of how you should be playing your class. So in order to be effective enough to run the Operations where I’d get that gear (and more effectively do my job in “normal” hard mode Operations) I have to get down into my gear and pull pieces out and slip new pieces from other end game gear in. For example, my Black Hole chestpiece isn’t my Black Hole chestpiece anymore. It had too much endurance and not enough strength. So what did I do? I pulled out some strength enhancements from a Rakata drop I found and combined them with my Black Hole chestpiece, making the overall strength bonus for the gear higher without losing its armor bonus and minimizing the amount of Endurance I had to sacrifice (a crucial resource for when I inevitably draw agro or take area damage during boss fights, both occupational hazards of being a melee DPS in Operations).
Once I had a chest piece that was good enough (I guess) for me to do my job and survive the punishing battles of HM-EC (SW:TOR, shockingly, loves its two word acronyms for Flashpoints and Operations) it was time to move on to kitting out my lightsabers as best I can. The Oath of Ragnos, my Rakata offhand, was a great little toy with lots of strength and the like, but its crystal boosted Power, not Critical Rating. Power’s always useful, but for my character, who relies on getting lots of criticals one after the other after the other to stack up massive bursts of damage in a few seconds, Critical Rating is slightly better. So I removed the boring Red-Black crystal (tame only by the standards of end-game SW:TOR) and inserted a Yellow-Black color crystal that gave me a sweet critical boost. And if I’m gonna do that, then I might as well switch out the crystal on my War Hero’s lightsaber (a PVP oriented weapon which is arguably easier to acquire than a Rakata mainhand and is equivalent in terms of its base damage output, if not its strength bonuses) which just made it a little bit better against other players with a sweet looking Green-Black crystal that boosted its critical output. Now my critical percentage was a full percent and a half more likely, boosting me to just above a one-in-three chance of scoring a critical hit when I’m fully buffed.
But wait! There’s more! Now that I look sweet and my gear has been properly tweaked, it’s time to soak money into installing Augments, introduced to the game a few updates ago, into my late game gear. These Augments provide small bonuses to existing gear bonuses, allowing players to get a little bit more out of their gear if they’re willing to pay out the fucking ass for it. Augment kits cost around 30,000 credits on the Galactic Marketplace, SW:TOR’s auction house, and cost another 30,000 credits to install. Then there are the Augments themselves, which cost anywhere from 15,000 credits for a modestly priced, pretty good Augment, to 60,000 for the top of the line Augment (providing an additional two stat points in each of its effective categories compared to the “good enough” Augments) that you really want since, let’s face it, you’re taking the time to do this to your gear. The price tag for the components required to make a slot alone represents about an hour of hard farming in one of the end-game areas, easy enough to get from going through the Daily Quests you thought you were done with or just killing your way through dozens of enemies. But installing the Augment also means you have to go to a special bench with your special upgrade to make a slot in the item you want to install the Augment into. These benches are almost never located conveniently, so you might have to look for a while. You’ll almost definitely have to go out of your way. Once the slot is introduced, you’ll insert your Augment and then click accept.
Still awake? Kudos. This bullshit item shuffling, obtuse as it is, has actually been very compelling for me as I get into a sort of dirty math thinking about which upgrades I can afford to buy when. I’ve gone from having a massive surplus of cash to spending nearly all of it in a matter of days. But I’m still playing SW:TOR and I’m still upgrading my items, grinding them to be slightly better so I can run Explosive Conflict and get the last pieces of gear I need to start running Explosive Conflict in Hard Mode. These micromanagerial iterations have become the crux of the game for me in this queer interim period, where I find it banal to get better gear but need it all the same.
This isn’t exclusive to Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’ve done this time and time again in other games with other gear. Dragon Age and its varied runty offspring are a terrific set of examples. These are games of dozens of whirling parts, some of which fit into certain machines. Success in them depends on a willingness to sit down and reach wrist deep into the gear system, swapping out pieces for a plus one here or a lifesteal effect there. I found myself choosing between an improved chance to dodge and better armor class, divvying up the best gear painstakingly among my party members and doing insane things to get slightly better items that are “the best” for fights that, realistically, I wasn’t actually going to have that much trouble with. But all this could be seen as a means to forward Dragon Age’s story. Every once in a while, there were certainly fights where that game forced you to sit down and pick apart how you were playing so that you could adapt to the challenge at hand.
But there are games where this sort of micromanagement entirely forms the crux of the gameplay. Gratuitous Space Battles occurs entirely before the play itself begins, with a series of tweaks to equipment and spaceships that iteratively improve the performance of your ships and, if you’re lucky, lower their costs, allowing you to field more ships. GSB is a game that is played exclusively between the scenes: you can put your ships on the field and tell them what to do, but there isn’t much more to it than that. The end result is a great deal more engaging than you might think, but even without that tremendously valuative statement GSB’s existence as a game posits something very interesting: that this sort of micromanagement is not only acceptable in games, but that it is a compelling aspect of play for at least some percentage of the population.
Many games today seem bent on making this sort of activity optional. Civilization 5, for example, automated its most intense process of managing individual citizens in special structures within cities, allowing players to take over this activity if they chose to do so. Civilization 4 had no such concessions to its like micro-managey players (though I’ve heard many arguments as to how Civ 4 fails, and how Civ 5 continues to fail, on down the line from Civ 2). Many contemporary RPGs also stress a simplified system of equipment or progression: Skyrim’s simplification of the incredibly tweaky Elder Scrolls leveling system is a perfect example. Morrowind allowed players to equip individual gloves and rings. Oblivion took a step back, pairing gloves and denying you the specificity of selecting a different left and right hand glove while retaining all of the often infuriating bits and pieces at work within leveling in an Elder Scrolls game, and leaving the equipment system more or less intact. Skyrim dramatically decreased the number of pieces of equipment players can equip, and totally rewrote the infamously micro-managey progression system at work in the Elder Scrolls universe. Though the end result still required tiny changes and choices to be made on a regular basis, it was far less dramatic than it had been previously, and careful selection of activities was no longer a key element in progressing a character “correctly” though the game.
The micro-management elements always seem to remain, and players, some of us anyways, seem to always be drawn to them. Is SW:TOR a sign of things to come? Are we to play games in the future where micromanagement will be optional, costly and, in the end, quite rewarding? It’s difficult to say for sure: the spreadsheet management game has long been a compelling hidden genre for many, and all kvetching to the contrary, it’s difficult to see it fading any time soon, or ever really, even as we witness a world where games are encouraged to become faster, simpler and slicker.
There’s something wonderful at work there, isn’t there?
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