I woke up this morning to find the most pleasant of emails in my inbox: my invitation to the Star Wars: the Old Republic early game access. I’d preordered the first week the game was available but had not realized I needed to add my code to my account details on the website until almost two weeks later. So I was crossing my fingers I would get in today.

I jumped online and created Anexxia, my Sith Inquisitor, and marveled at how many guildies we already had online (36 or so at once during our peak today.) My SO hopped on his Sith Inquisitor and we spent the better part of the day questing our way through the origin world, including grouping with my new guildies, and getting to learn our way around the finer points of Sith (in)civility. And I loved almost every minute of it.

So let me get my gripes out of the way:

Gripe #1: As per my BETA experience, Bootcamp and SWTOR do not like my Apple bluetooth keyboard. I had to change it out for another keyboard before I could do even my first quest. This bums me out quite a bit since I love my regular old Mac keyboard. But I am grateful my SO anticipated this happening and ordered a spare keyboard I could use.

Gripe #2: for the first time in my gaming life, I had to ratchet down all my graphics settings in order to play. I was horrified that my iMac, which could even allow me to raid with gorgeous graphics settings, was choking on SWTOR’s graphics. I ended up ratcheting down the resolution and turning of shadow to give me the level of FPS I am used to.

Those technical annoyances aside, my trek to level 11 today was a fun one. My surly companion Khem Val has already started to grow on me. He’s moved beyond threatening me with dismemberment to threatening to eat others in my vicinity. I appreciate that in a companion.

First and foremost, today has been all about the lightning. The beautiful, sparkly, shimmering purpley lightning to be exact. As soon as I hit level 10 and spec’d into the sorcerer advanced class, I tossed those pesky light saber attacks aside and filled my action bar with more delicious force lightning attacks. Considering how much of my WoW game life I spent as a shadow priest or on my elemental shaman, it’s no surprise I have such a strong kinship to the purple lightning. But enough about the purple lightning.

I found the inquisitor class story to be incredibly compelling, and overall being an excellent path to easy dark side points. With the exception of one tricky quest whereby your taking someone’s money, then sabotaging their quest for someone else actually earns you light side points of all horrid things. And in case you are unclear as to how this Inquisitor feels about light side points, ask my guildies about the hypothetical diseased orphans. That’s all.

My first flashpoint, Black Talon, was made up of 3 guildies and myself. And all of us were intent upon trying to out evil each other in our replies to the quest text. It was delicious. We tore through the instance quickly, and were amused when our guildie Irish somehow ended up with a bag full of loot only he could have used at the end of the run. The RNG, my old nemesis!

The lack of luck with the dropped loot encouraged me to work a bit on my professions. Unlike my BETA experience, I didn’t find any archaeology nodes to mine while out questing today, and none in the instance either. Though I must note I found about 4 chests in the flashpoint. So I had to spend much of my questing earnings on sending my companion on archaeology quests in between my synthweaving crafting sessions. I ended the day’s playing with synthweaving at 56, which isn’t too shabby. And I was able to make myself a couple of greens. No blues mind you b/c those Underworld Trading cloth reward quests kept failing on me. *shakes her tiny sith fist in the air*

Tomorrow, I shall work towards obtaining my ship, and continuing through my class storyline, and exploring the new world that lies before me. It’s hard to believe that after all this anticipation, the game is finally here, and I’m actually playing it, with a character I get to keep!

And last but not least, last night Amazon gave a shipping update for all of us who preordered through them: the game will be shipping in time for us to have it in hand by the 19th at the latest, so we will not be waiting around on release day for our product codes, itching to play. Love how this is all coming together.

I can’t wait to start hearing from all the other folks I know who have not yet gotten in to the EGA to hear how their first days go– I hope everyone has as smooth of a start as I’ve had. Once I get farther in to the story, and come up for air, stay tuned for some guides and other content to help make the most of the first few levels of getting situated in game.

cheers!