Anstal Tane finishes his class story...

... and moves officially into "semi-retirement." None of these guys ever really retire, of course, except for the three characters I deleted, but without a class story to play, my use of him will be much more sporadic. I'm thinking of setting him up to be my Cybertech backup too.

Anstal was one of my early Second Wave characters. The first wave characters, which I mostly still have, all kind of disappointed me in that most of them have stupid names that I struggled to come up with to get the game to take them (it didn't allow space bar and had limited characters, and couldn't be the same as any other character on the server. Wow, that was hard. Once the character limit increased and they allowed a space bar so you could make a first name last name combination, it became much easier.) The look of them is all quite primitive. But I have a fondness for most of them nonetheless. But with the second wave I had two goals; one play, through all the classes (now called origin story) with the other advanced class (now called combat style.) Remember, that this was before the story and the mechanics were decoupled. If I played a smuggler, for instance, it had to be either a scoundrel or a gunslinger. I'd done Luukke as a gunslinger, so Anstal was a scoundrel. Second, I wanted not only an alien, but an unexpected alien; one that didn't really fit the mold for a Republic character. I picked the Sith species for Anstal Tane, of course, which you can readily see from his image below.

I also always had a single look in mind for him. Although I did in fact create a few alternate outfits, I rarely used them, and they were more for experimentation than anything else. The "space biker" concept held out from the very launch of the character. I did modify it slightly over time; gave him different gloves, bracers and boots, for instance, and I tried a lot of different pants before finding these great "blue jeans" stand-ins. But the jacket was always the same, the helmet was always hid, and the belt, curiously always remained the same too. I also ended up changing the gun to a random world drop that I got, because I couldn't believe how perfect it was—it looks like kinda like a space 1911 fer cryin' out loud!

Going with that theme, I have most of my characters doing lots of random mounts, but Anstal only ever had two enabled; the Rishi pirate dune buggy speeder, and the bounty hunter BBA chopper bike.

Although it's kind of considered gauche in the community, I don't really care, and I ended up ending the game on Voss and Corellia with Risha wearing Princess Leia slave girl stuff. What's the point of galivanting around the galaxy with a beautiful girl if she's not a trophy wife showing off her stuff, anyway? I ended up making recordings of a lot of the later cutscenes, so I'll be editing and putting them together sometime in the next months, no doubt. I'll probably use a lot of it while talking about the smuggler in my Mother of All SWTOR Class Review videos based on my recent post here with the same name.

I actually kind of like that panel with his name and an explanation of his outfit. Maybe I'll make more of those for my other semi-retired characters, and their various outfits. Most of them aren't so focused on a single look like Anstal was, after all.