Jedi by Knight

Last weekend’s Double XP promotion in SWTOR was a great excuse to get back to playing an old character, Sortisi (I first mentioned her 2 years ago here).  She’s actually the first character I created, based on the character I played in the beta, but she languished at level 17 as I got caught up in my bounty hunter, and then moved on to other characters.

When I went back to playing her (which involved rearranging my whole UI to avoid misclicking), I truly remembered why: my husband had also created a Jedi Consular (Meileili) so that we could play those characters together.

Yeah, cuz that totally happened.

B and I play TOR several times a week, typically at the same time in the same room.  But I cannot remember the last time we played “together,” with our characters in the same place, on the same quests, grouped.  

We simply have different styles of play: I play on a PVE server, and he plays on a PVP server with his guild of real-life friends.  He enjoys end game content, like Huttball and ops, while I tried Galactic Starfighter once three months ago and just didn’t get it.

Of course, no couple’s gaming interests are going to sync perfectly.  In board games, he likes Die Macher and Battlestar Galactica and I prefer Ticket to Ride and Catan.  But there’s still plenty of overlap: we just got 7 Wonders and Dominion for Christmas, because they were both on both of our wish lists.  I’ve even played the Star Trek deck building game with him…more than once.

We’ve never played any console games together fully, except the LEGO series.  And that’s only because I bought him LEGO Star Wars one Christmas, and after he tried to act grateful, I informed him there was co-op mode and I bought it so we could play together.  He was still dubious at first, but I think he’s enjoyed most of the LEGO games so far, and it’s very easy to have players drop in and out of these games, so we can switch back and forth between single player and co-op as needed.

Going back to TOR: it’s my first MMO, so I think B really wanted me to enjoy it when I started, and he thought that playing together would help me ease into it.  Therefore, he created a toon of my same class on my PVE server; that way, we could run all the quests together.

Obviously that isn’t exactly how it played out, but playing Sortisi with Meileili is actually still beneficial in another way: Sortisi is my first healer, so learning how to play that role with a more experienced player on DPS sitting next to me is great for feedback.  He was able to give me some gentle hints about who I should be healing and when.  Hopefully this will help build my confidence (and competence) so I can heal for pick-up groups on heroic missions, etc.

I guess it’s all about finding a balance between your gaming needs and your relationship needs.  For us, playing different games at the same time seems to be a good default.  That way, B never has to yell “2 is jump!!”

Although I’m sure he will forever remind me of the time we played Mario Kart, and I sat on a “?” cube just to get blue shells to throw at him.  It’s a legitimate strategy?