Never gave this a shot in the past but made a bad bitch Imperial Agent last night and played long enough to get off Hutta to the Imperial fleet. Having fun so far, haven't played much of anything the last couple of months and before that it was finishing up PoP on Agnarr. I went in with the intention of just doing story missions seeing how far I could get before the obligatory grind, but ended up taking a few side quests anyway and ended up overlevelled. I think I was at 14 with the area scaling me down to 12, so it does seem viable to stick purely to the story only if you don't want to deviate (so far at least). The good thing is it didn't feel like time wasted since the other quests were always on the way and provided other slot armour/weapons. You'll get decent chunks of experience just for exploring too so the grind is non-existant.
I'm free to play so far, and yeah the pay walls get put in your face pretty often. Inventory space being limited to 30 spaces has been manageable, toggling your helmet on or off doesn't worry me. The most notable one
is movement speed though. Speeder Piloting is available at level 10 if you're paying and level 20 if you're not. When you see people zip by in the newbie area with a mini chicken walker or those round wheel bike
things that's the stuff that makes me wanna pay to play. All done on purpose of course, but still.
I did run into a glitch that had me falling through the world trying to get to Dromund Kass, an issue that's been around since 2012 apparently. I put this down to playing while the rest of the game was downloading in the background. Had to quit out, go into the install directory and delete the entire "Bitraider" folder which prompted the launcher to do a file verification and redownload a couple of gigs. Just quitting and relaunching wasn't enough. A quick google to fix but not exactly smooth sailing for a new player.
Little niggles aside it's engaging. I like how most areas have other players roaming around so instead of instancing a whole zone, little rooms or areas are cordoned off and crossing the threshold puts you in your private area to further the story. There's enough good here to make me want to continue and what I've seen of the bad hasn't made me want to uninstall.
I was tempted to go human female body type 3 and roleplay intergalactic handball but went with body type 4 instead because thicc.
