Life of the Night

The Nar Shaddaa Casinos are once more brimming with activity, which can only mean one thing; the Nar Shaddaa Nightlife Event is back, and with it come more opportunities for people to wile away the weeks spending as many Credits as they have trying their best to win the newest rare items.

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A couple of things are different this time around.

Firstly, two new Jackpot rewards have been added to the Kingpin's Bounty Slot Machines: The Gamorrean Bodyguard Companion and the Vectron BWL Wraith Speeder.

Secondly, the previous Jackpot items - the Kingpin's Rancor and the Vectron Magnus - are no longer possible drops from the Slot Machines. Instead, they can be purchased for 30 and 15 Golden Certificates, respectively, from a new Casino Prize vendor.

Thirdly, for the first time since the Event's been introduced - justified slightly by the fact that Galactic Strongholds were introduced after the first Event and the second iteration was basically the first with nothing extra added - Decorations are now possible gains from the Event. Much like the Kingpin's Rancor and Vectron Magnus, these can be purchased for Golden Certificates via the Casino Prize vendor.

Finally, following the trend of the first iteration of the Nightlife Event adding in a whole host of new species, two additional new species have been added with the third. There is only one representative of each species, who is standing next to the Pit Boss of each Casino who offers a new Daily mission. Unlike the species added in with the last event (female Nik'to, Ishi Tib, Aqualish, Klatoonian, and Snivvian) these two are completely new to the Star Wars lore, even though they borrow heavily from existing species.

The species of this first character, Sellexith, is reportedly identified in the game files as a "Daichyura". It seems to be borrowing and tweaking some design aesthetics from the Vurk species.

The species of this second character, Grenkk, is identified as a "Krex", and looks like it could be borrowing from a whole host of different Star Wars species, since there's quite a substantial number of species in this universe with Saurian aesthetics, the most notable of course being the Trandoshan. That horn does look rather ridiculous, though.

It's slightly disappointing that BioWare are focusing on creating their own original species while there are still a lot of outstanding sentient species from elsewhere in the canon Star Wars universe to be introduced. Still, as much as I would very much like to see Iktotchi, Lannik, and Cerean, I can't really fault them for creating more species whose heads aren't based on a human model. Hopefully we'll see more of these chaps, but I'm not holding my breath.

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The six Decorations are a mixed bag.

I'm not a particularly huge fan of the Gambler's Mic Stand in general, but it's decent enough, is a very welcome addition to anyone running a Cantina within their Stronghold, and it has a nice animation (your character picks up a separate microphone and sings whilst a music probe appears blaring behind you). Similarly, the Gambler's Bar, whilst much more obtrusive, can be used just as a piece of ambient scenery since the attached animation (simply having a drink) is on the whole completely insignificant.

The Dynamic Underworld ceiling lights (Blue, Red, and Yellow) are very nice. It's wonderful to have ceiling lights that you can turn on and off at last, and of course you can use all three in a large enough room to create some interesting lighting. It's a shame that we haven't got a proper Disco Ball ceiling Decoration, though...

... Mainly because of the final Decoration. The Gambler's Party Floor is a 4x3 grid with 12 glowing squares, basically representing a traditional disco floor. As it is a floor covering, it's not the easiest Decoration to have multiples of in the same place, so it can often look a little too small depending on where it's placed. Interacting with this floor causes you to dance, using various Cartel dances and even some brand-new ones.

The pre-existing dances that can be seen are:

• Beach Party (two animations thereof)
• Lepi Hop
• Peanut Butter Jelly
• Smuggler Shuffle
• Starslide
• Swing
• Tihaar

There are three new dances thrown into the mix; one is unisex whilst the other two are gender-specific versions of the same dance. The unisex one takes heavy inspiration from the "Night Fever" dance scene of Saturday Night Fever, whilst the gender-specific one features rapid foot movements and a nice twirl. You can tell it's gender-specific because female characters performing it have an additional second-long animation within where they raise their forearms roughly perpendicular with their breasts and subsequently shake their chest. 

Sigh, yet another 'alluring'-type dance, then. Still, at least it's short and nowhere near as ridiculous as the female version of the "Club Dance" is, and it's a nice fluid animation, so it'll do. 

It's nice to receive some more Cantina-specific Decorations through this Event, and they're reasonably cheap - "cheap" depending on how lucky you are with Golden Certificates, of course - so it's easy to acquire multiples, which is very nice. 

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The Decorations and previous Jackpot items aren't the only things which can be acquired from this vendor. An additional mount, armour set, and Companion Customisation can also be bought from there.

The mount is called the Pearlescent Cruiser, and is perhaps one of the most illogical mounts yet, simply because of one thing; like all of the Skiff mounts, your character is lounging backwards, enjoying a nice plate of grapes, although one thing is absent. The pilot. All but one of the previous Skiff mounts has a pilot to steer the vehicle where you want it to go, but for whatever reason the two most recent lounging-back mounts make it seem that you're steering it with your mind. 

It's still a nice-looking mount for characters who look like they'll gladly indulge in spending luxuriously, but it seems to serve far better as an expensive lounger than it does as a functioning vehicle.

The armour set is basically a Legacy-Bound version of the Euphoric Corellian armour set, with one key difference; the gloves are Covert Energy gloves. For those of you who don't have a vast lexicon of each and every armour set, the Covert Energy armour is invisible to the naked eye, allowing your character to 'remove' their chestpiece, bracers, gloves, belt, and shoes. This is so far the only time a Covert Energy piece has escaped the Cartel Market, and is something which a long time ago I would have paid even real money to have before the Outfit Designer was introduced. 

Seriously; I always found it aggravating how my Sorcerers benefiting from Legacy Gear had to wear full gloves when logic (and some previously-written 'rules' from KotOR) dictates that Force Lightning would be restricted by the armour in the first place. Still, as much as it is now sadly unnecessary for me due to Outfit Designer, it's absolutely wonderful to see a BoL version of this now-quite rare armour piece find its way in-game at long last.

Finally, the Companion Customisation which can be bought is the T7 Customisation 7. It's not exactly new; it's the Space Jockey's Starfighter Pack T7 Customisation and it's nice to have it be more readily available as it is very decent, but I am slightly disappointed that there aren't other new ones alongside it. They haven't even tweaked the Hutt Cartel HK Customisation so that it works for HK-55, either. Ah well.

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Of course, I can't go much further without describing my own results. I've had a bit of a history with the Nar Shaddaa event, having spent the equivalent of 24,000,000 Credits the first year just trying to get the Rancor (and was rewarded for my efforts with no less than six Vectron Magni along the way), only to then win a second Rancor after spending just 100k. Yay.

This year, I decided to moderate myself a fair amount, which isn't easy considering that there's only one person in the world who I tend to get very impatient with on a regular basis; myself. Indeed, as I predicted might happen, after spending 2,000,000 Credits on a stack of 1,000 Smuggler's Casino Chips I found this impatience getting the better of me and within 40 minutes I had bought a stack of 100 Kingpin's Casino Chips for 7,500,000 Credits.

So, 9,500,000 Credits spent on the Event so far. Still a hell of a lot better than 24,100,000, though...

However, this indulgence had paid off, as by the end of the first hour I had won approximately 17 Golden Certificates (two via Jackpot at the Smuggler's Luck machines) and won both the new Jackpot prizes exactly once each. Huzzah!

I then took a short break of a few hours before returning just to spend as many of what remained of my 1,000 Smuggler's Luck Casino Chips as I could, which was about 750. Rather than try to win anything "big", my main goal was just simply to see how many more Golden Certificates I could win solely for those new Decorations. On top of winning about 30 more Certificates, I ended up finishing the day with an additional Gamorrean and Vectron.

I do find it rather amusing that both times I've given in to my self-impatience I've ended up getting the "big" prizes again later on for substantially less expenditure than the initial rewards. Ah, well. Good thing I don't go near real-world gambling hovels...

I'll probably return to the Event at some point, just to grab more Golden Certificates. I don't want the option to acquire more to go away before I've acquired a sufficient number of those new Decorations; I have a feeling that the Dynamic Blue ceiling lights could be quite nice for the eventual Manaan Stronghold...

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It's nice to see the Nar Shaddaa Event back, and it's even nicer to see that it comes with new rewards and purchases. It's always rather aggravating when a rare Event returns and it's still the exact same as it used to be, because they get stale really fast with nothing new to spice it up. It's one reason why I never give the now incredibly frequent Rakghoul and Gree events a look-in anymore, even though there are still Achievements which I need to acquire from them (notably that blasted Symbiote Rakling still evades me...).

I'm curious to see whether they'll spice it up again next year, or whether we'll see the same pattern of the event being the same for two years before it's spiced up. I don't mind either way now that it has already been spiced up once, as if this was its third year with nothing new I don't think it would be very appealing to many people.