Emily's Star Wars: The Old Republic Diary: Baby's got a brand new ship

Glucas finally gets his flying license.

Glucas is a silent tiger. He's weaved through waves of mobs for 16 levels with the nimble footing of an Orient cat. Glucas is a guilt-free killer. His eyes are wet spheres of hate, and with his slave-girl companion Vette attached at the hip, he smells the piss-pants terror of his enemies and goes off path to cut down every Sithspawn he catches in his periphery. This kind of dedication to a constant and meaningless rampage of death explains why he's roughly one level higher than every other user in the game when they get their first personal Starship – something you tend to see roughly around level 15.

But after a long series of questlines, our Glucas was finally whisked away on an all-expenses paid trip to Dromund Kaas' spaceport where he's given his first set of keys for wheels of his very own.

As lackey to the mask-faced Darth Baras, he's spent the last few hours meandering through the Dark Temple, a nexus of dark energy where ancient weapons get sealed off from the outside world. Baras wants a torture device. The Ravager is what he has his eye on, something that forces the truth out of a person. Baras is looking to use this on a young spy who's infiltrated the Sith under command of Baras' arch enemy and has so far kept mum about the Republic secrets he's holding.

Glucas sucks the information out of the spy with the device. Baras' enemy has a young padawan under his wing, it turns out, who can sniff out dark Sith energy if it's hidden in the ranks of the Republic. Glucas needs to get off-world and find her, which more importantly means: Our boy is getting himself a ship.

The Starship. The Starship! Every complaint about TOR relating too closely to World of Warcraft gets fired directly into the Sun with the arrival of your first ship – something that takes the game far further into Mass Effect territory than Azeroth. The Starship is a massive piece of work, introduced via a cutscene that's shot like pornography for vehicle enthusiasts. The slow camera cuts between the wings and the engine, then a full ship-belly shot. It would be the stuff of comedy if it wasn't the climax of hours of developing your character and networking with Sith lords to get to this one dramatic point.

There's a whiff of ME2 in the design of the ship. Wandering inside, Glucas is greeted by Toovee Arrate, his personal factotum droid who explains the set up. The Astrogation console includes an updated map of the galaxy that you'll use to navigate through Space. Interstellar communication happens via a holoterminal in the main room of the ship.

But it's classic Star Wars in feel – and that's the important part. Despite the amount of Jedi and Sith roaming the world, many of TOR's worlds – including Dromund Kaas, the jungle planet Glucas currently calls home – can become faceless environments in the way that many MMO zones quickly devolve into. The planets of Star Wars are iconic but hours of Dromund Kaas turned the setting into little more than an endless pattern of trees and clearings. The appearance of the Sith ship brought Star Wars back into the game for the first time in hours.

The ship looks and feels like what the franchise should be, and it's proof that the feeling of being nine and making "wrrvvhh" sounds while you swing a stick is equally important to Star Wars' legacy as its lore is. More importantly, it's a ship that is yours. It's rare for an MMO to give you something that can't be shared or traded - World of Warcraft's promised housing system never reared its head in the end, and Guild Housing in general is a rarity in these games. If you didn't have some level of deeper attachment to the game while cultivating your character's personality, you will when you're handed your own bloody space ship.

This is the end of Glucas' Dromund Kaas chapter. Now he has free reign of the galaxy. Wrrvvhh.