Beyond Dark Mondays

Dark Mondays are fun. Rampaging through the undergrowth as a wolf-pack of Legionaries laying waste to the bewildered wildlife – it's definitely fun. But it's a bit rubbish if you want to know the storyline. There's always someone waiting for someone else to catch up, and you become acutely conscious of people standing around on your account. So it becomes a space-space-space storyline with a best guess of which flavour cynicism you want to display. And any sense of narrative is lost in the rush. However it's a great way to blast through heroics and group content, but we do still need to go back and play slower time through some of the quest hubs to have any hope of keeping track of who is doing what to whom and why he, she or it is doing it to him, her, it or them. And missing out on these storylines would be a great shame for any of our imperial characters. Because these narratives (sometimes) open up the perspectives on the stories for all our characters. As with a book, shifting the narration from a first-person perspective to third-person opens up the focalisation and creates a breadth and depth to the narrative. Of course, as with a good book, sometimes there are excellent reasons why it's only the one perspective, but a game like TOR seems to me to be very strongly geared towards encouraging you to play alts and alternate stories. The legacy system, the pace of levelling and the ease of experience gain - it's all subtly designed so that when you roll your next character there will still be new discoveries to be made as you explore the gameworld. Naturally, this is intensely frustrating for the completists in our community; if you're hung up on seeing everything on the one character you have decided is your main, then you will be spending a lot of time looking at grey quests in your mission log. (Although your codex will be beyond fabulous.) Damn, even playing the same class but with a levelling buddy can totally open up your experience. Different stories, different responses, dark deeds – a winning roll by the one morally-dubious character among us in Esseles won us all the Backstabber title to our great amusement the other night. Don't just live a little, live a lot...

You can listen to Beyond Dark Mondays online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Beyond Dark Mondays is an episode from Aartan Away SWTOR Podcast by Orix & Xeevo.

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This episode was published on Feb 14, 2012.

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