Legacy Reborn Full Story Review

Right, it's finally here, my full review of the Legacy Reborn story update. I don't know when these became such a big deal to me... I think that as the story updates became more nuanced in terms of character development, I just started to feel like I really also needed to talk about them in more detail to truly do the experience justice.

Anyway, if you're looking for a spoiler-free review, I'll just quickly repeat what I said on Bluesky shortly after the patch came out: "Great update. I laughed, I was sad, I went "that's so cool" many times - what more can you ask of anything Star Wars?!"

Another thing that's worth noting is that this was the first main story update since 2023 that didn't include a single KOTOR-style cut scene. As I personally haven't minded these too much, it didn't even register with me at first until I saw others talking about it afterwards and went "oh yeah, that's right", but I do believe there are players out there to whom this will be very meaningful. We'll see how the devs handle the cut scenes in 8.0 and onwards.

That's about as much as I want to say without spoilers, so below this screenshot we get into full spoiler territory. If that's not something you're looking for at this point, you have been warned.

The story starts with a long cut scene that initially shows Malgus and Shae's crew approaching Heta's fleet in a stolen Hidden Chain shuttle. Malgus makes an "I'm sensing something in the Force" face and decides to nope out of Team Shae by simply jumping straight out of the shuttle onto the planet's surface, much to Shae's chagrin.

Down on Khar Shian, we see Rivix slot Darth Nul's holocron into version three (as far as we know) of Nul's machine and Jadus explains to Heta that it needs testing. (The room that this takes place in is a great set piece by the way, with some cool visual effects when the machine gets activated.) There are a few prisoners kneeling in the background, including Sa'har and Tau (who is also here if you're an Empire player, with a side remark from Rivix explaining that she was captured during an attempt to rescue Sa'har in this timeline). Sa'har is selected as a test subject and put into the chair of the machine. As it starts up, she's clearly in pain and Ri'kan is not pleased. When she cries out in agony it's enough for him to actually make a break for it and he manages to interrupt the ritual with an angry outburst of Force power. He and Sa'har run away while Tau also breaks free and attempts to buy them time to escape.

Meanwhile our character returns to Odessen, where the Supreme Chancellor or Empress/Emperor awaits us on their flagship to talk. There's a big stand-off where they consider taking you into custody and Sal-Deron/Krovos are not happy to find out that you lost Darth Nul's holocron. Your present allies (Arn/Anri and Lana/Theron/T7, who are also there) empathically argue against this course of action when the Mandalorian fleet also arrives, with the Ordo brothers jet-packing right into the hangar. They also express their support for your side, and after some more agonising tension, Republic or Imperial leadership give in and agree to leave things be for now and tackle the threat posed by Jadus and Heta Kol first.

I thought this whole scene was brilliantly done. You can really feel the rising tension as your supposed allies from the Republic/Empire try to boss you around and you're obviously not going to take it, but at the same time both sides know that applying (lowercase) force at this point would have serious ramifications that would be hard to come back from. It was great to see your allies backing you up and talking about how great you are, with the arrival of the Mandalorians finally moving the needle enough to cause the Chancellor/Empress/Emperor to blink first.

In an interesting twist, if your character is a saboteur, they are actually exposed at this point, meaning the Chancellor/Empress/Emperor are not just mad at you about the whole Shae/Malgus/Jadus situation, but have genuine reason to want to take you down because they know that you've betrayed them. I thought this was an interesting way of framing the whole scene very differently, and in this light their reaction to actually being betrayed seems almost subdued. Your ally who just rescued you from the Enigma still speaks up for you regardless, and Republic/Imperial leadership still agree to deal with the current threat together for now.

Either way, with peace temporarily restored, the fleet jumps into Hyperspace towards Khar Shian, you catch everyone up on what happened on the Enigma and come up with an assault plan. It's agreed that you'll have to work with what you got as you are unable to call for further reinforcements. The Mandalorians, who now have some Basilisk droids thanks to Lane Vizla, agree to lead a diversionary ground assault while you and a small group of allies try to take the sneaky route to find Jadus. (There was a bit of dialogue with Lane here which sadly only seems to appear for a character that has completed the Bessi storyline, which due to the way it's set up can only happen once per account.) Meanwhile your faction will provide support from space and fight Heta's fleet there. (Side note: During the Imperial version of this bit we see that Maiya Vix from the Oricon storyline has been promoted to... captain or something? That was a nice little detail.)

As you arrive above Khar Shian, it's time to put your plan into action. You get to take part in a brief custom space combat section playing as either Daeruun and Arn or Krovos and Anri (in Krovos' ship). The devs were concerned that this could cause motion sickness for some people so it pops up a warning about that before starting and allows you to skip the whole gameplay section. The first time I ended up skipping it by accident, but I did play through it later on alts. By that point I was actually quite curious what it was like as seemingly every comment I'd read about it was pretty scathing and uh... yeah, I get the complaints about this one. It's nothing like the old space game or GSF, just a weird little section that is extremely on rails and hard to interact with.

The problem is that you're supposed to shoot targets on a large enemy ship, but your own ship's path is completely locked in and the point of view is straight ahead where most of the time you can't actually see your targets. While you can technically turn the camera to look around and see where they are, the moment you let go to actually click on a target, the camera snaps right back to the default view that barely lets you see anything. I eventually settled for just spamming tab target until it would lock onto something off screen, and then fire rockets at that whenever it would let me. While a slightly awkward process, it does eventually get you where you need to be. It's a shame because I feel I do understand what the devs were trying to do with this section; the implementation just ended up being poor.

While all this takes place, your character descends onto the surface in a stolen Hidden Chain shuttle of your own with Lana and either Theron or T7-01. The Mandalorians also try to land their ground forces but are repelled by a shield. Since you can pass through with the stolen shuttle, you have the option to suggest having a look at taking said shield out from the ground.

As you approach the area to land, you see Ri'kan and Sa'har running away, and are given the choice to fire at either them or their Hidden Chain pursuers. Then you perform another one of your by now infamous crash landings. If you didn't shoot at her, Sa'har will briefly help you fight off the Hidden Chain but then still nopes out of the situation since she promised Ri'kan to stay with him and the two of them just fly off unscathed either way. It was funny to me that Lana says at this point "I can't believe Sa'har stayed to help us fight" because all I was thinking was "I can't believe Sa'har just ran off like that".

You and your allies enter Naga Sadow's old fortress via a rocky tunnel. You feel the pressure to locate the shield generator as soon as possible as the Mandalorians are struggling and your faction's fleet is under attack by a giant ion cannon (always those ion cannons). Eventually you find a strange droid that looks like something off Iokath and which is attached to the fortress via dozens of cables. It attacks and when you kill it, the fortress' shields go down.

After this, we see a cut scene of Shae's team taking down one of Heta's lieutenants just as he's on the comm with her, and Shae tells Heta that she's coming before advising her team to split up. Heta meanwhile (still in the room with the machine) finds her eyes drawn to an ancient Sith blade (presumably Naga Sadow's) and picks it up. Nothing bad ever came from grabbing ancient Sith weapons, right?!

Jadus watches her with no more than mild interest while Rivix tells him that the machine should almost be fixed up/ready again after the test got interrupted earlier. Jadus tells Rivix that this means it's time for the latter to leave and prepare "for the next phase of the plan". Rivix is taken aback but Jadus assures him that he's the best judge of how to deal with the way events are unfolding.

With the shield down, the Mandalorians are finally landing, and we pivot to Lane, Rass and Jekiah in their new Basilisk droids - which we get to control and use to wreck the fortress' ground defenses, though the Mandalorians are eventually forced to continue their assault on foot. The attack of the Basilisk droids is another vehicle section where we get to take control of another character - this time it's Jekiah Ordo in his Basilisk, with Rass in his own as his "companion". This section was much more fun than the space bit, even if the droid handled like a drunk elephant sometimes. Listening to Rass go from complaining to being excited about his Basilisk was amusing.

In general, it was very clear by this point why the devs chose to have these sections playing as another character in this update. When it was first mentioned in the dev stream, I had no strong opinions on the idea but it seemed a bit random to me. Seeing it in action, you can tell that it was a deliberate choice to better convey the grandeur of the battle to the player. During this fight over Khar Shian, a lot of things happen at the same time that your character simply can't be there for, which would've meant either adding even more cut scenes to an already pretty cut-scene heavy update, or simply summarising things that happen elsewhere in a couple of sentences of NPC dialogue, which wouldn't really have done them justice. Having seen Broadsword's solution in action, I think it was very effective in this update and really allowed us to take part in everything that happens even when our character is not in the room for a particular event. 

While the Mandalorians assault the fortress, the fleet once again calls you for help against the ion cannon, and Lana agrees to split off to activate the fortress defenses while you continue towards where you think the machine is. So in the next segment you get to play as Lana and Theron/T7 for a bit, fighting and slicing your way towards some orbital defense controls. You/they manage to activate it for one big shot that at least is enough to disable the ion cannon.

Again, I actively loved this, in particular as it gave me flashbacks to KotET chapter eight and wondering why the heck three people can't split up to assist both Torian and Vette - but in a good way. Sometimes splitting up simply is the smart choice, and I appreciate the devs letting our characters be smart here, while at the same time reminding us that Lana and Theron are really quite capable on their own as well.

Meanwhile the Alliance Commander encounters Shae. Rass and Jekiah show up shortly after and there's a confrontation involving lots of shouting, during which Rass in particular really goes off on Shae, though Jekiah as usual pushes for calm. Then Heta joins the fray, ancient Sith weapon glowing ominously.

Within moments, her and Shae are at each other's throats like rabid dogs, and a wild brawl ensues as you and the Ordo brothers join in. At the end it segues into a cut scene during which Heta's sword makes the crystals in the room resonate somehow so that they zap everyone. You knock off Heta's helmet and we can see that she's already been physically corrupted by the Sith weapon. Shae then pushes Heta into the crystals so that they both get electrocuted (?) plus Shae also gets stabbed by Heta in the process. Heta dies surprisingly easily from the crystal zaps, while Shae stumbles back into the room one more time to expire tragically in Jekiah's arms (after uttering some appropriately dramatic last words).

While my description above is a bit flippant, I thought it was an appropriate ending for a character as important as Shae Vizla, who's been with us since the pre-launch trailers, sparred both against us and by our side in Shadow of Revan, as well as fighting Arcann's skytroopers for us on Darvannis. The way she became obsessed with hunting down Heta personally was ultimately her tragic weakness. She clearly never became fully comfortable in her leadership role and relished the opportunity too much to just run off and hunt on her own again.

I've seen some discourse here whether it wouldn't have been better if we as the player character got to stand judge over her, and as far as that one goes - I'm kinda eh. The stereotypical light side choice of all being forgiven and her coming back into the Alliance wouldn't have worked here - as she says herself, she doesn't think she has anything to be sorry for, and both the Republic and Empire were very pissed at her as well. I can see why a dark side scenario of killing her could've been appealing for vengeful characters, but I think whatever the outcome/fallout with Heta and the Ordos would've been from that would then have felt unsatisfying in a different way. Basically, I was fine with Shae having that particular spotlight for a moment (not like I personally cared about hashing it out with Heta myself for the umpteenth time anyway) and being able to respond to her dying words with either respect, affection or a variant of "I would've preferred to kill you myself, but whatever" worked well enough for me.

While the Mandalorians deal with the expiration of their Mandalore and any remaining Hidden Chain forces, you continue onwards alone. You find a trail of dead Jadus acolytes left behind by Malgus, which segues into a section where you play as him fighting his way towards the room with the machine.

When he arrives, he's confronted by a vision of the Empress or Emperor, his former master, but he successfully dispels it to identify his real opponent: Darth Jadus. A duel between the two of them ensues, during which you play as Malgus and win. (Though Malgus is panting like an old man at the end, which made me chuckle.)

He picks up the holocron and inserts it into the machine before sitting down in the chair and starting it up again, which is when our character arrives. You can approve of him using the machine or try to stop him, but something odd happens anyway - you realise that the machine hasn't really been on, but you seem to be trapped in some kind of illusion projected by the Sith meditation sphere hanging above you. Another vision appears, this one of Darth Malgus' old master (whom he killed in the Return cinematic), Darth Vindican, who warns you about Malgus' treachery, but the latter urges that you just need to get out of this together.

What follows is a very fascinating descent into Malgus' psyche. You attack the meditation sphere's anchors around the room but to no success, and instead more visions seem to spring forth from Malgus' brain, including of his former rival Lord Adraas from the Deceived novel. He gets lost in trying to fight it and even attacks you, forcing you to beat some sense back into him. However, he then immediately sees another ghost from his past: Eleena Daaru, his old Twi'lek lover (also from Deceived and the old trailer of the same name). He seems to briefly get distracted by her affections but eventually kills her again, just like he did in life.

This section is so incredibly cool if you're familiar with some of the lore involved. I read the tie-in novels years ago so it's not like everything was still fresh on my mind, but as things slowly started to come back to me, I became more and more engrossed. Oh right, it's the guy from the Return cinematic. Lord Adraas who...? Oh right, that guy! Now all that's missing is Eleena - and oh snap, there she is. 

I do wonder how well this section lands for people less familiar with the background material. Presumably more people have seen the trailers than read the tie-in novels, so I can imagine some being able to make the connections to those at least, but there are probably even more who didn't recognise any of these characters from Malgus' past. While the in-game context makes it clear enough who they are and why they matter(ed) to Malgus, I imagine it must be somewhat less impactful if you're only just meeting them all for the first time so to speak. 

Back in orbit, the fleet is noticing increasing levels of power from the fortress, and your faction's leader wants to order a strike of the location to take the machine out, though Arn/Anri and others warn them that you and other good people are still down there.

Meanwhile on the surface, you and Malgus are confronted by a vision of Jadus next, and you realise that Malgus didn't actually kill him - Jadus is sitting in the meditation sphere and causing all these visions. His projection tells you that he's modified the machine so that it won't just awaken the Force in people but will also fill them with terror of both the Jedi and Sith, with Jadus offering the only way out.

You fight and win against this projection, which results in the real Jadus leaving in the meditation sphere, while Malgus sits down in the machine again. You can (unsuccessfully) try to stop him one more time, but he does manage to call out to the galaxy. We see a number of shots from various locations with known characters reacting to the voice in their head, from Satele Shan and her students (hi, Syl) to the overseers on Korriban. (It's been pointed out that it's strange that Overseer Ragate is alive here when we seemingly killed her in the Korriban Incursion flashpoint. I guess the old lady is more robust than we gave her credit for and was only "defeated" to eventually get up again. Or the devs forgot that she was supposed to be dead. Take your pick.)

I really liked how the views of various other locations also incorporate past choices into the scene. We see Petra on Ord Mantell, alone or with her sister Mina by her side. In the Odessen Force Enclave, we see Sana-Rae and Kira, but depending on if they are alive/you invited them, you might also have Arcann and Senya, and/or Jemala and Ora in the background.

Now that everyone knows that the machine is on, your old faction's leadership orders that the fleet bombard the fortress. You and Malgus get buried under a bunch of rocks (with it being notable that even as a non-Force user, the Force seems to have been awakened in you) and credits roll. When you exit, you just appear on Odessen.

Whew, that's a bit of a cliffhanger, isn't it? I'll admit that this part was a bit disappointing to me, not so much because I'm against cliffhangers in principle, but just because of how utterly detached it is from the rest of the game. What I mean by that is that there's always a bit of a clash between the single-player story and the open world MMO elements - the story might tell you that you're in a race to save the planet, but you can opt out of following that storyline any time to do something else without any negative effects. However, it's one thing for the player to decide to break their immersion for a bit and another for the game to do it for you.

Imagine if Knights of the Fallen Empire chapter one had been released as a standalone back in the day, with chapter two coming out a week later. Imagine ending with your character being frozen in carbonite in the story, and then being spat out on the fleet just to be told to come back later to find out what's "canonically" supposed to be happening to you right now. It just feels wrong to me. Maybe it will make more sense when 8.0 comes out and future players will have a smooth transition from that being-buried-under-rocks scene to whatever aftermath comes next, but right now it feels a bit bad.

All that said, as a whole I found this update pretty damn brilliant. We'd been building towards this for such a long time, with so many different characters with different motivations pursuing their own agendas, it was bound to be epic and Broadsword delivered with what's probably the biggest cast featured in a single story update since the game's launch. Who'd have thought we'd be eating this well fifteen years into the game's life? Shae and Heta's arc finally reached a satisfying conclusion, and I think Malgus is supposed to be dead as well now, though I'm not 100% sure with him. It would be a good time for him to go in my opinion, after that nostalgia trip through his past.

The sudden cliffhanger aside, I'm okay with not everything being tied up in a neat bow. What happened to Tau? I have no doubt that we'll be dealing with Rivix again, but she just seemed to disappear without any fanfare. Do we still have reason to care about the Kateen siblings now that Ri'kan finally got fed up with Heta and they've both run away? I guess we'll see sooner or later, though I suppose the more pressing questions are how our character survives being bombarded from orbit and what impact the broadcast from Nul's machine had on the wider galaxy.

Also, even though I just wrote over 4000 words about Legacy Reborn, I do think I'll have more to say about it still, as well as about Legacy Sith as a whole, now that its story has finally come to a conclusion. Stay tuned!

Class Story Counting

I mentioned in a previous post that after I decided to cut back on my involvement with Galactic Seasons, I was hoping that this would free up some more time to get back into the story aspect of the game. I saw it as a first sign of success on that front when I finally completed the Jedi knight class story on the Leviathan server last week, something that's been four years in the making - four years, that is, during which I logged into that character almost every week but was spending all my time on pretty much everything other than story.

As I watched a victorious Jedi flee the Dark Temple once more, I found myself thinking about how it had been a while since I'd last completed the Jedi knight class story, which was kind of weird because it sure has felt like I've been spending a lot of time playing knight story missions in recent years. So this then sent me down a rabbit hole of taking a look at how often I've completed each class story, in what year (if I had data on that) and how it compared to how many alts I have who are still "stuck" on earlier steps of the story.

Trooper:

Completed a total of 4 times:

• On my main on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2012
• On one of my alts on Darth Malgus (female, was supposed to be neutral but I just checked and she has 0 dark side points due to some KotET era shenanigans I think) - this one's been sitting there ready to start KotFE for years now but I just haven't been able to get myself to pull the trigger; according to the blog I completed her class story in January of 2016
• On my Star Forge main (female, light side) in 2024, more than eight years after I first created her on the Ebon Hawk server
• On one of my alts on Shae Vizla (female, light side) in 2025 - one of the few characters I've played in recent years who finished their class story before hitting the level cap (she's level 75 at the time of me writing this)

It's kind of wild to me that there were eight years between my second and third completion of the trooper class story! Though completing it twice in the last two years isn't too bad. 

There also isn't a lot of variety here in how these were played. There is a dark-sider and a male character among the 8 "story-in-progress" troopers I have on top of that, but most of them are still more nice ladies.

Smuggler:

Also completed a total 4 of times:

• On my original smuggler on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2012
• On two alt smugglers on Darth Malgus (both female, one light side, one dark side), in 2013 and 2016
• On Star Forge (female, light side) in 2024

Same issue here with all of them being very similar and an eight year gap between the thrird and fourth completion. I also have "only" 5 more smugglers in progress, as it turns out. At least there are two males in the mix there, and two potential dark siders (for one it's still a bit early to tell). I was actually a little surprised that I don't have more smuggler alts, but I'm thinking it may be because of the fact that smuggler is one of only two classes on which I've managed to take more than one character past KotFE and KotET, which makes it feel like I've spent a lot more time playing smuggler stories than I really have. 

Jedi Knight:

Also completed 4 times!

• On my original Jedi knight on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2012
• On two alt knights on Darth Malgus (both female, one light side and one dark side), in 2017 and 2022 
• On Leviathan (female, light side), as per the start of this post

It's interesting that these are more spread out, with the biggest gap being the five years between 2017 and 2022. I also have 5 more knights still waiting in the wings, but I was surprised on checking that only a single one of those lives on Darth Malgus; all the others are on the other servers.

Jedi Consular:

This turned out to be the Republic class story I've completed the most often: 5 times.

• On my original Jedi consular on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2012
• On two alt consulars on Darth Malgus (both female, one light side and again, another one that I remember being neutral but the game also shows her as full light side now), in 2014 and 2020
• On Satele Shan (male, neutral), at the end of 2024
• On one of my alts on Shae Vizla (female, light side), also in late 2024

This is also the only Republic class story I've completed on a male character so far, and I have no fewer than 10 more consulars on earlier steps of the story, which is more than I have troopers, even. Again there's a six year gap at one point, and I actually completed the story more times in the last six years than in the eight years before that.

Sith Warrior:

This is the Imperial origin story I've completed the most often: also 5 times.

• On my original Sith warrior on Darth Malgus (female, dark side), back in 2013
• On three alt warriors on Darth Malgus (two female, one male; one light side, one dark side and one neutral), in 2017, 2024 and 2026 respectively
• On my Shae Vizla main (female, mostly dark side), in 2024

I actually completed the dark side Sith warrior on Darth Malgus only the other week - she's been one of my primary PvP alts for a while and I was just passing some time while waiting in the queue. This one generally felt like I've done it a few times more recently and the numbers actually back it up, with no fewer than three of the five completions happening in the last two years! I also still have 6 more warriors "in progress".

Sith Inquisitor:

With this one, I was surprised to find that I've only actually completed it 3 times.

• On my first inquisitor on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2013
• On two alts on Darth Malgus (both female, one dark side and one neutral, even if the game once again disagrees with me), one in 2014 and one in 2024.

Two of these completions were forever ago, and then it took me no fewer than ten years to go again! Also, that last completion was an instance of me playing through a class story in tiny chunks over a really long stretch of time so I don't actually remember that much of it.

What's also worth noting here is that I used my two free character boosts on inquisitors, which means that technically I have more of them with advanced story progress than of most other classes, even if those two never went through their class stories. There are also another 7 whose class story is still in progress. 

Imperial Agent:

It turns out this one is tied with the inquisitor for last place with 3 completions:

• On my original agent on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2012
• On my saboteur alt on Darth Malgus (female, light side) in 2016
• On a third alt in 2017 - she used to be on a different server but was merged into Darth Malgus at one point, though I never played her again after that - you can tell she's old because she's level 63 and on Makeb in terms of story

What do you mean it's been almost a decade since I last completed an Imperial agent's base class story?! This is madness! Fortunately I have two of them now that are getting close again. In total, I only have 5 more agent alts in the works, which makes this my least played origin class. Again, this was a surprise considering that I've always been quite fond of the agent story.

Bounty Hunter: 

With this one it's back to 4 completions:

• On my original bounty hunter on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2013
• On two alt hunters on Darth Malgus (both female, both dark side), in 2014 and 2022 
• On one of my alts on Shae Vizla (female, light side) in 2025

Again we have that big eight year gap. 6 more hunters in progress.

Conclusion?

Having completed each class story about four times on average may seem like a lot to some, but considering that I've been playing the game since launch, it's less than I would've expected. It does make sense that my focus on redoing the stories decreased over time, not just because of seasons but also because I engaged in endgame activities in general. Still, for most of these it feels like it's definitely been a while and like I'm more than due for a revisit of those final chapters (the early planets are something I've done plenty of times).

That said, I was surprised that there were quite a few that I've actually completed relatively recently and where the biggest gap of me not doing any story was actually somewhere around the years between 2016 and 2020. While seasonal activities discouraged me from spending too much time on class stories, the fact that they got me playing on more servers actually seemed to help my appetite for going through them again, compared to my main server where I'd already seen and done it all multiple times. 

I was also surprised that in terms of overall character count, consular came out this far ahead with 15, but on second thought it makes a lot of sense: Before Legacy of the Sith decoupled combat styles from origin stories, consular and inquisitor were the only classes where I really loved both available combat styles, so they were my #1 pick for new PvP alts for a long time (and I do prefer Republic over Empire).

I'm hopeful that these completion numbers will go up soon if I continue on my current track, as I currently have a trooper and an inquisitor on Corellia as well as a knight, agent and bounty hunter on Voss.

Where Has All the (Manic)Time Gone?

Having completed every last one of my Galactic Season 10 goals, and having made the decision to dial things back for Season 11, I've been feeling strangely liberated over the last couple of weeks. I can actually come up with my own goals again - goals that I can start and stop at any time, instead of merely trying to figure out how to get through a massive in-game checklist efficiently enough that I can still catch a full night's sleep by the end of it.

As a result of this, I've been playing less but have been enjoying it more, which led my mind down a weird path: Have I involuntarily been reducing my own enjoyment of the game by trying to do too much? If only there was a way to track my play time... oh wait.

More than seven years ago I made a post about how I'd installed an app called ManicTime to track my gaming habits - and then promptly went on to never mention it again. I've referred to it occasionally when writing the end-of-year round-ups for my WoW blog, to figure out whether I'd spent more time playing the modern version of the game or Classic, but I never really looked at anything in great detail. However, I'm still using the same PC I had back then, and I've allowed the app to gather data all this time. Time to have a look!

It didn't take long to tickle the following graph out of ManicTime, showing my SWTOR play hours from February 2019 to June 2026, grouped by month:

So uh... it's a lot! You can see that my play time definitely increased after I started doing seasons on all servers, but there's a lot going on there in terms of ups and downs, so I decided to look more closely at what exactly happened when.

As I already mentioned, my first point of reference was February 2019, which I talked about in the post I linked a few paragraphs up, where I was slightly embarrassed about having accumulated about 130 hours of gaming time in a single month, split between SWTOR and Elder Scrolls Online. Ironically, those 66 hours played ended up being one of the lower data points for SWTOR in the chart.

Over the next few months, my monthly play time only increased, hitting a peak of about 120 hours per month played throughout May and June, which I can only chuck up to me feeling energised with excitement about the (then upcoming) Onslaught expansion at the time, which is something I did write about.

However, this excitement didn't last and my play time started to drop again soon after, hitting the chart's third lowest point in September 2019, a month in which I played less than thirty hours of SWTOR. This makes sense in so far as WoW Classic launched at the end of August, which had me super excited and hogged all my attention for a while, to the point that I was probably only logging into SWTOR for scheduled group content. In a normal week I generally attend three ops nights with my guild which last about two hours each, which in turn adds up to 24 hours of play time in a month even if I do nothing else, so that maths checks out.

My play time increased again when Onslaught actually launched, though that peak did not rise as high as the one for the pre-expansion excitement. The chart's second biggest peak comes in the first half of 2020, which makes sense as this was when the UK went into lockdown because of Covid. While I was still working more or less as normal, just from home, I did have more time to play due to no longer having to commute, and many guildies who were unable to engage in their usual in-person socialising activities were constantly online, making my SWTOR experience feel as alive as it has ever been.

Things dropped off for me in the second half of the year, because while Covid was still a thing, I'd been recruited into a guild in WoW Classic (after having hit a bit of a lull in that game before) and became super active there, once again at the expense of SWTOR. Basically that whole "slump" period from August 2020 to August 2021 was caused by my WoW Classic focus.

There was a brief activity spike in September 2021, though I'm not entirely sure what the reason for that was. There was a Total Galactic War during that month which had me binging on SWTOR for at least a week, and I did also write about being excited for Legacy of the Sith.

Again that pre-expansion excitement didn't last, however, as I got pre-occupied with WoW Classic once more (which had reached the Burning Crusade by that point), though my big investment in that would eventually peter out a few months after that for a number of different reasons.

This leads us to the lowest point on the chart in November 2021, where I apparently played fewer than 20 hours of SWTOR, meaning I likely didn't even do all my usual group activities that month. This makes sense though, as we usually take a bit of a break from ops in the weeks immediately leading up to an expansion, and at the time, Legacy of the Sith was supposed to come out in early December, until it was suddenly delayed until February.

When LotS finally launched in February, I did get active again and my activity continued to rise all the way until May, which I think I can definitely "blame" on Galactic Season 2 and my project to progress the seasonal track on all servers, as the expansion itself infamously launched with not that much content and wouldn't have kept me that busy for that long.

Once my goals were achieved, activity dropped again, with patch 7.1 only producing a tiny bump - I was not happy with the game at the time. But then Galactic Season 3 arrived and I was off to the races once again! And played even more when I decided to also do the meta objective to complete 100 weeklies on all servers.

I'm not going to keep talking about every single peak and drop after that, but I do think it's clear from the patterns on the chart that a new season always increases my time investment. The biggest peak on the entire chart was March 2024 when I launched myself into doing a Galactic Season on six servers at once for the first time, apparently spending close to 220 hours in game that month. That's seven hours per day, every day. How I pulled this off while also working and sleeping, I don't know, but that's what it says.

Anyway, I do think the chart shows that doing Galactic Seasons across multiple servers has indeed massively increased my hours spent in the game. (Compare this to the first season, which just resulted in a more or less horizontal line at the sixty hour mark for four months.) The part of the graph that shows my activity pre-Legacy of the Sith has some peaks and troughs, but most of the time my activity levels hover between 50 and 100 hours of play each month. And I have really fond memories of those times!

Yet ever since Legacy of the Sith, the average seems to have shifted closer to being between 100 and 150 hours, meaning I've spent almost twice as much time on the game, without necessarily having twice as much fun. I often wonder why I feel like I don't have as much time to blog and make videos as I used to and um... yeah, that looks like a big culprit of that to be honest! And I definitely do think that I want to reclaim some of that time to do other things.

I'm not saying I regret spending all that time on Galactic Seasons. I do think in the earlier seasons in particular, the spikiness of the graph shows some real excitement on my part, getting super hyped and binging hard, with a matching drop-off in activity and recovery period afterwards. But I think the graph for the last two years also tells a slightly different story, with the peaks getting smaller and the drops between them more shallow. I've just been playing and grinding consistently because that's what I do now I guess. I think I'd like to move away from viewing the game like that for sure.

A Good Time to Come Back to SWTOR

A couple of months ago I got a very surprising DM, from a player who had been in Twin Suns Squadron with me throughout 2012 and 2013. He'd decided to finally get back into the game and wanted to re-join the guild as well. I've got to admit that he and I hadn't been super close back then, so after more than a decade I barely remembered more than that he was English and had always seemed kinda nice, but that was still more than enough reason to welcome him back with open arms.

Our guild has pretty low churn, so it's not unusual for someone to take a prolonged break - sometimes several years long, even - and then come back and be happy to find that they are still in the guild and able to immediately pick things back up where they left off. But someone coming back after thirteen years was definitely a longer absence than anyone had ever returned from, so his level 55 trooper did need a re-invite, which I was happy to provide.

Since then, he's been online most days and is often hanging out in the social channels. I was honestly pretty delighted to see him go through all the expansions he'd missed in real time, based on which achievements were popping up in guild chat each evening. Ooh, he just finished Shadow of Revan! Ooh, he's doing chapters now! Etc.

I'm pretty sure he's fully caught up by now, but the achievements have kept on coming. The other night I congratulated him on unlocking Bessi, and he replied with something along the lines of "I just keep finding new things to do; it's great!"

While someone coming back after this long may be an unusual situation, I've also noticed an uptick in more "regular" returners, people who've just been away for months or a couple of years at most. Steamcharts also recently registered the highest player count for SWTOR since around 2023.

It just feels like a good time for that kind of thing. Knowing that there'll be a new expansion at the end of the year has people excited. If you got bored of waiting for story updates at some point during Legacy of the Sith and checked out, that storyline is now wrapped up and you can come back and play through everything you haven't seen yet in one go.

Additionally, we're also at the end of Galactic Season 10 now, with Season 11 probably starting in August, and both of these have been bringing back companions from previous seasons, giving people another chance to pick them up now if they missed them before. With only a few weeks to go it's too late to organically complete the Season 10 track in its entirety, but the companions are right at the start of the track so it's not too late to play a bit to just unlock those.

As a reminder, these are the followers you can still unlock from now until July 27th:

• Altuur Zok Adon, the companion from the very first Galactic Season that ran from April to September 2021,
• PH4-LNX, who was originally available to earn between October 2022 and March 2023.

Season 11 will then give you a chance to grab these two companions if you missed them before:

• Fen Zeil, who was previously earnable between February and July 2022.
• Amity, who was the main reward from Galactic Season 4 between March and August 2023.

 So if you haven't played in a while and happen to read this... I'm just saying!

New Player Meets Old Player Meets Endgame

I have absolutely no clue about the actual numbers, but my general impression has long been that for an MMO that's approaching its 15th birthday this year, SWTOR still does pretty well as far as attracting new players goes. Despite what some may say, Star Wars is still quite an active franchise, so new people have a reason to find and try out a free Star Wars game all the time.

Getting those new players into endgame is trickier, because the general public has been dismissive of SWTOR's raiding pretty much from launch, and over time the devs have also supported this kind of content less and less. It's not like World of Warcraft, which has a reputation for being a game that's very much worth playing purely for its endgame (even if it has other problems as far as new players are concerned). I'm not sure anyone has started playing SWTOR in the last decade with endgame being a primary driver of their interest. (If you have, or know someone else who has, shout out in the comments!)

As a result, I'm always delighted when a new player ends up joining our guild and it turns out they are interested in operations. That makes them such a precious find, I just want to accommodate them and make them happy, but at the same time without overwhelming them. It doesn't always work.

At some point last year, a new player joined our guild whom I shall call Bob. Bob turned out to be the son-in-law of an older member of the guild who'd also just returned after a bit of a hiatus. Yes, we're training the next generation of MMO players here! Bob originally started levelling with his significant other, but she lost interest after a while, something that easily could have spelled death for Bob's engagement as well. However, he really seemed to enjoy attending our social nights, whether his girlfriend and father-in-law were there or not, and quickly became a valued member.

As far as I could tell at least, Bob wasn't terribly bothered about his performance, and I loved that for him. (Disclaimer: He did later do a few runs with one of our progression teams and I don't know if the subject came up in that context, but that would be outside my purview.) He upgraded his gear over time, sure, but despite being surrounded by a lot of people who care about min-maxing their stats and rotations, it didn't seem to rub off on him. I always hear people complain about how every MMORPG is solved these days and how new players supposedly get crap all the time for not following the meta, so it was nice to see someone being this carefree still.

The one thing I did push him on a bit was levelling an Imperial character, if for no other reason than that we sometimes like to do activities on our Imp side alt guild, and without a max-level character, there were some of them he couldn't join for. At first I simply tried to minimise our activity on Imp side during social nights, but after a while I felt a bit bad that we apparently all couldn't go there just because of him, so I kept egging him on to finally get those last few levels on his Imperial Scoundrel.

The day he finally dinged 80 on his second character felt glorious - and as one of that week's seasons objectives was to do a flashpoint, we made him jump right into that (I don't remember whether the objective specifically required a master mode flashpoint or whether we just decided to do one of the featured flashpoints on master mode). Sure, his dps wasn't great and he was undergeared, but we should be alright to carry him through most master modes, right? We ended up in Battle of Ilum of all places, which is one of the oldest and easiest master modes nowadays.

About halfway through the flashpoint, I noticed that he was seemingly just spamming Lacerating Blast (the Scoundrel's AoE with no cooldown) on every pull. "If you want to do more dps, you'll have to do use some of your other abilities occasionally," I teased, to which he responded "I know, but this one's just so fun". Can't really argue with that, can you?

And everything seemed fine. Perhaps we weren't proceeding as fast as we could, but we weren't having any problems either - until we wiped on the last boss due to nobody interrupting his Force explosion.

Now, I can't blame that one on Bob, because there were after all three other people in the group who could've done it. My excuse was that I was healing and more focused on the group's health bars than on enemy cast bars. The tank was one of our progression raiders on a Juggernaut/Guardian alt with not so great gear - I don't remember all the details, just that he'd been unable to procure a better weapon in the moment and had been joking about how he was using some random green lightsaber ever since. The second dps was another long-time guildie on a Sniper alt. She used to raid with us as a healer a long time ago but (like me) had never been much of a dpser.

Anyway, we laughed about the fact that this ability still did enough damage to kill us at this point in the game, dusted ourselves off and went again. We wiped a second time for the same reason, by which point I decided that healing or no, I needed to watch Darth Serevin's cast bar like a hawk.

On the next attempt, Force explosion finally got interrupted - and then we wiped due to the boss's enrage. Again, us old-timers were stunned. We didn't even know this guy still had an enrage!

Our tank started to feel embarrassed about his green lightsaber and went off to get a better one. It also wasn't until this point that it really sunk in for us just how low the gear rating of Bob's newest alt was. The max item level right now is 343 and I think he sat at around 200. We sent him to the fleet to buy a few higher-level greens from the vendor there, but he ran out of credits before he was able to upgrade his full set. Still, it didn't matter. Newly armoured and more determined than ever we went at it one more time and finally beat Darth Serevin on the fourth attempt.

This was a few months ago now, and I still haven't been able to get that run out of my head, because even though there was definitely a part of me that was kind of annoyed to be wiping in Battle of Ilum repeatedly, another part of me was honestly kind of amazed by the experience because I didn't think it was possible for a new player to still have this kind of organic learning experience in the game in 2026. Once upon a time, this is how we learned how to beat a boss fight ourselves of course, by trying and failing and then trying to improve on the next attempt. But these days, all the content is so much easier, it's almost impossible to fail, right? Never mind that everyone will know what to do.

Well, it turns out you can still fail even with three experienced players, if - despite knowing better - they are careless and silly enough. And for some reason that made me happy.

PvP Season 10 Ponderings

I haven't talked about PvP seasons in a while, mostly because the devs haven't changed anything about them since stretching out the reward track back in season six and the objectives are always the same, so there isn't really much to talk about from my point of view.

I also still have the same concerns about the state of PvP that I elaborated on in this post from two years ago, primarily as far as the state of queues is concerned. I guess things have at least remained stable, as it's been two years and I'm still managing to get both my warzone and my arena weeklies done, though the lowbie queues still feel like they take forever. It's particularly bad when I'm approaching the top end of the lowbie bracket and have to make sure to not accidentally out-level it before I'm ready, meaning I have to twiddle my thumbs while waiting for matches to pop instead of at least doing some quests in the meantime.

It makes me wonder whether I wouldn't enjoy the PvP season more if I just stopped trying to go for the arena achievement, like I did in a few of the early PvP seasons... but I do kind of like the gameplay (in the lowbie brackets at least) and the extra rewards for completing the meta achievement are so massive it really feels like leaving money on the table to skip just this one part of it.

In general, PvP is just suffering from feeling a bit stale at this point in my opinion. Did you know that it's been close to eight years since we last got a new warzone map? The last time we got a new PvP gameplay mode was with the Proving Grounds over ten years ago. Even the introduction of PvP seasons happened three and a half years ago at this point - and yes, I still miss my MVP votes. I get that the SWTOR team is small and that they have a lot on their plate as it is, but still... I also have a lot of things to spend my time on as a player, and PvP with nothing new happening is definitely getting a bit boring. I wonder if 8.0 will include anything interesting for PvPers?

Anyway, so as not to sound all doom and gloom, jumping into PvP again for the start of the season has also been a reminder of what I do still love about it. Like pugging, it's a bit of a window into the server community, showing you which guilds are very active, who's that one guy that seems to play absolutely every single day, and so on and so forth. (Back in the day, PvP was how I found the guild that Mr Commando and I now lead together, so don't underestimate the ways in which it can bring people together.)

I particularly love seeing all the "meme" characters with ridiculous names or looks - I'm not always a fan of that kind of thing, but in the context of PvP I do tend to find it funny. Try telling anyone to focus fire the guy with the below name for example:

I was also amused to see "Agent Mako" looking exactly like the bounty hunter companion, and chuckled at "Caterina de'medic" the Commando healer. Only today I faced off against Spiderman in Huttball. Sometimes that kind of thing manages to take the sting out of even a bad loss.

And of course, there are the matches that are just super memorable. Like the one I dubbed "closest Novare Coast win ever", which we won with only 2% integrity left on our own bunker, and when the enemy's bunker hit zero they had just killed off our last defender and were already three quarters of the way into flipping one of our turrets. They were just seconds too slow!

Or the Voidstar I played on my Merc healer alt where in a highly unusual turn of events, the enemy left me almost completely alone for most of the match. That practically never happens, and I remember thinking "I wonder what kinds of healing numbers I'll end up doing when left to my own devices like this" and the answer was over fifteen million. I was pretty chuffed! (And we won.)

Legacy Reborn's Potential Gameplay Implications

I'm really keen to do a full review of Legacy Reborn's story, but I think I'll need a few more playthroughs for that, so in the meantime I'd like to talk about another topic related to 7.9's story update. I originally meant to post this after the review, but it's much easier to write so I'll do it first.

Note that this will still contain spoilers for Legacy Reborn's ending, so don't read on if that's something you want to avoid!

So the story ends with Malgus activating Heta Kol's machine to call out to the galaxy's Force users whether we like it or not, which will surely have a major impact on 8.0's primary narrative. However, as someone with a trooper main there was a detail in the final cut scene that I found very interesting: our previously purely tech using classes are affected by the machine's call as well and suddenly feel the Force, which is reflected in our character reflexively holding back a rock that's about to fall down on our heads.

I didn't manage to take a screenshot on my main, but here's the equivalent moment on my agent alt. 

Now, I didn't think that was too big a deal initially - while I've always been adamant that I don't want my main to be a Force user and disliked the way KotFE treated all player characters largely as if they were, that storyline did also leave us with every character displaying at least a bit of Force sensitivity in the story, as evidenced by things like the extra action button in KotFE chapter 12 that lets you tame an animal companion for part of your journey, or the way you reflexively shield yourself against Arcann's attacks in the final confrontation with him at the end of chapter 16.

I don't think it's ever been made explicitly clear whether that was just Valkorion using his powers while he was possessing us or whether he left us with a degree of "residual" Force sensitivity anyway even after being expelled. Either way, our character holding back a rock was definitely a step up in power levels (lifting rocks isn't easy, just ask Flingeld) but still, it's not like we're suddenly all Jedi or Sith now. I do trust the devs enough that I'm pretty sure we won't suddenly be shoehorned into that in 8.0, though I can imagine our sudden enhanced abilities coming up in conversation.

I did find myself wondering how having a stronger sense of the Force would affect my character's combat abilities, concluding that she'd still be using her weapon primarily but could maybe learn a few Force tricks to help her out along the way. And she would just be one of many in the same predicament.

Which then got me thinking about combat styles! We know that we're never going to get a new origin story, but since 7.0 split classes into origin stories and combat styles, a new combat style seemed a lot more doable. Most of the time I've seen people talk about how they'd like to have a tech class with a blade, similar to how some companions already work (e.g. Tanno Vik or Broonmark), but I realised that Legacy Reborn instead feels like the perfect setup for a tech combat style with some Force abilities.

The great thing about that would be that unlike giving tech users a blade, it would still be fully compatible with the existing story cut scenes since you'd still have the same weapon, the Force abilities would just be an extra thing to use outside cut scenes.

There would be some kinks to work out - they'd have to make it possible to change combat styles for one thing, as currently you can only add a second one but then you're stuck, and many players probably already have two. Plus from a story point of view it would be weird for a new character to be a Force-using smuggler on Ord Mantell I guess, so maybe there'd need to be some kind of restriction on when you can start using this new combat style? Then again, it's probably no weirder than Jedi shooting lightning on Tython, which is also allowed now, so...

I don't know whether I'm just building castles in the sky thinking about this, but it just seems like such an obvious idea once you think about it, I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone else bring it up yet. I'm very curious to hear what else the devs officially announce for 8.0 now that 7.9's cat is out of the bag so to speak. 

Galactic Season 10 Review & GS 11 Plans

We've got a little less than two months left of Galactic Season 10, but I'm once again getting close to completing all my personal goals (I've got about 20 weekly objectives left to do for the meta on Darth Malgus, and the other servers are all 5-10 levels away from completing the basic track), so I wanted to take a look back at how things went.

Sadly there's no two ways about it: this has been my least favourite season for a while. I didn't think it was going to be this bad when it was announced, but the objective structure just did not work for me at all, as I originally discussed in my first impressions post. Galactic Seasons have always encouraged me to go out of my comfort zone a bit and I was fine with that, but this season in particular was so far out I could barely spot the borders of my comfort zone in the distance.

In the past, I'd usually complete at least one or two weekly objectives early in the week without even trying, just by being active and doing other things, but this season that just hasn't worked at all. I'd log in on Saturday morning to see where I'm at and find that I'd literally be on 0/7 with not even partial progress towards anything. To be clear, this might have been a me thing and others may have found this season's objectives a breeze to complete, but for this veteran player at least it was just no good.

(I also still can't believe they made me kill all the Dark vs Light bosses a fourth time. At the end of Season 8 I wrote: "And by god, if they ask us to kill all the DvL bosses a fourth time... I actually don't know how to finish this sentence, but I still hope they come up with something different for us to do next time." Then they gave us a one-season break from them, just to bring them back again for Season 10.)

Naturally, all this has meant that my cross-server play experience also got worse. I wasn't upset enough to stop, but only because I didn't really want to abandon the progress I'd already made. I did however resolve to not do the next season on multiple servers, since we already know that it's going to be very similar in terms of structure.

In some ways, this has been kind of difficult to admit to myself, because I've been doing this whole cross-server seasons thing for over four years at this point. I like habits and routines, which is why I can find it very difficult to break them once they are fully formed. And it wasn't just a habit, it was genuinely fun... at times.

I've come to realise that I've probably been a slowly boiling frog in regards to doing seasons on multiple servers for some time now. When I first started doing it back in 2022, it was just a silly and novel way to enjoy the game. I wasn't that serious about it; I was just delighted by how easy Galactic Season 2 had been to progress compared to Season 1, so it seemed nothing but logical to follow a guildie's example and do the whole thing again on another server. I was also prevented from going too crazy by the fact that I didn't have any max-level characters on many of the other servers, so objectives to run dailies and the like were not even an option yet. I needed to use the buyout option for several levels to actually complete the track everywhere.

During Season 3 I got really into it and even pushed myself towards completing 100 weeklies on every server, but basically realised immediately afterwards that this had been a bit too much and that I probably wouldn't want to do that again (until Season 9 that is). In general, I experienced a pattern of pushes and pulls as far as Galactic Seasons go, being excited and binging on them some weeks while approaching something close to burnout in others.

For a while I thought this was all on me and needing to be able to regulate my game time better, but I've realised there's also the fact that my legacies on the other servers have matured over the years. In my early days of playing there, the whole experience was very exciting, seasons or no seasons: learning the culture of different servers, restarting a new legacy from scratch - these were all new experiences, while by now, playing an alt on any server doesn't feel that different to me than playing any alt on Darth Malgus.

I do also think that over time, the devs have - very slowly and incrementally - made seasons a little harder to complete. I don't think that's a big deal and the system is still very forgiving overall, but when you're playing on multiple servers, everything has a multiplier, meaning that a change that makes things take five minutes longer on one server results in "needing" to play for half an hour longer overall for the same result on all servers.

The first of these changes was the release of the Shae Vizla server in 2023, which meant that the game went from five servers to six and I instantly needed 20% more time to do all my daily tasks on "all" servers. Then with Galactic Season 6 in 2024, they nerfed the daily reputation Conquest objective, which had been an easy way to get your seasons daily done quickly if you were short on time. Galactic Season 7 saw a shift from "flavour" themes to gameplay-centred ones, which meant that the seasonal weekly objective(s) suddenly took significantly more time. Sure, you could argue that doing one bounty contract mission or one uprising isn't that much of a time investment, but compared to say, getting eight season points for simply visiting another player's stronghold, it was a big difference. Remember when we'd get seasons points for literally sitting AFK for a couple of minutes?! Those were the days.

And then of course we have this season, which turned the "earn 200k Conquest points" weekly objective, which used to basically be a freebie if you did anything at all, into another thing you actively have to work for via grinding. So basically, I'm a bit tired.

I'm hoping that limiting myself to Darth Malgus for Galactic Season 11, which will require literally only a small fraction of the effort I've been putting into seasons for the past few years, will allow me to reclaim some of my time and get back on track in terms of my enjoyment of both seasons and the game in general. Including on the other servers! I mentioned previously that I'd really like to finish some more class stories over there, but that's not something that's been meshing well with spending all my time doing seasons objectives over and over. I'd like to be able to work on that on my own time, whenever I feel like it, without having to worry about hitting a certain content quota every day.

Master's Enigma Prepares Us for the Big Finale

I'm way behind in terms of reviewing SWTOR's most recent story update "Master's Engima", which came out in 7.8.1. In fact, 7.9 and Legacy of the Sith's finale are only mere days away! That said, I've been putting extra effort in these past couple of days to get this review out just under the wire, before there's even newer story to think about. As usual with these posts, expect full spoilers and stop reading if you want to avoid them.

"Master's Engima" starts us off with a view of Sa'har and Ri'kan in a shuttle, with Sa'har being back to being Ri'kan's prisoner. I've got to admit I groaned a bit at seeing these two again. I don't mind the Kateen siblings as characters, but their dynamic has definitely become a big stagnant. You'd think that after the big showdown where Sa'har openly turned against Ri'kan and the Hidden Chain, she'd be done with constantly begging him for forgiveness, but no, we're back to her usual MO of being meek and apologetic.

Fortunately however, we don't spend too much time on this before returning to Odessen, where our character gets notified by Lana that she urgently needs to meet with you about something. While you make your way over, you get another call, this one from either Tau or Rivix (depending on your faction, obviously) who warn you that your faction's leadership is about to descend onto Odessen to moan at you about recent developments. Even if you've been fully cooperative and open about everything with them, they are not keen on the whole business with your former ally Shae helping Malgus escape.

You do still catch up with Lana first, who tells you that the urgent business is another message from Jadus, this time telling you to go to a specific set of coordinates, with no additional information (because of course). You barely have time to think about this before your faction's leadership arrives.

They are not doing things by half either: On Republic side the Supreme Chancellor herself is there, accompanied by Admiral Rava, Master Sal-Deron, Tau, Arn, and a whole host of Republic troops. For Imperials, it's the Empress or Emperor, accompanied by Darths Krovos, Xarion and Rivix as well as Major Anri and a matching set of Imperial soldiers.

Unhappy faces as far as the eye can see, regardless of your faction. 

A confrontation ensues regardless of how helpful and nice you've been in the past, though I've heard reports that this bit feels satisfyingly more justified if you've been playing as a saboteur (I haven't had a chance to verify that one for myself yet). You get to make a whole number of important-feeling choices here, even if I think they have limited impact on the immediate story outcome. It just feels good that you get to take a stand! You can decide to tell your visitors about Jadus or not (at several opportunities) and can acquiesce to various requests or be argumentative. I can imagine some players disliking the fact that their faction leadership treats them so badly here, especially if they've been loyalists, but I absolutely loved this part. Yes to political drama in my Star Wars! Inject it right into my veins!

Critically, there's a further incident when Master Sal-Deron or Darth Krovos touch Darth Nul's holocron and get thrown across the room, which leads to you being accused of tampering with it and the Supreme Chancellor/Empress/Emperor ordering you to stay cooped up on Odessen until further notice. Obviously not great considering you were just about to follow that Jadus lead!

Tau or Rivix have the same thought and suggest that you sneak out and follow the lead anyway. (They justify it by saying that clearly someone up top, whether it's Admiral Rava, Darth Xarion or whoever, has been scheming and is baselessly turning leadership against you.) Lana is on board (as is Theron, if he's around) and concocts a plan to sneak you out through some secret passages originally utilised by Theron during his traitor days. Arn or Anri overhear and aren't exactly opposed, but both stop you briefly before you leave, expressing concern about the dangers of defying your faction and running off by yourself like that.

This next bit has you sneaking out next to Tau or Rivix while dressed up as a Republic or Imperial soldier and OMG, this part felt like it was literally made for me. I mean, objectively it wasn't that exciting in terms of gameplay, just a bit of RP slow walking through the base in disguise, but the Republic trooper disguise looked a lot like the sort of armour my trooper actually wore around level 30 or so and it was extremely nostalgic. The game seemed to acknowledge this experience with my trooper even commenting that "this takes me back". Republic trooper nostalgia overload!

You successfully sneak out and escape on a shuttle with Tau or Rivix, and you have Darth Nul's holocron with you whether you wanted it or not. (Whether to try and take it with you is one of those earlier decisions, but even if you say that no, you're happy to leave it with the Jedi or Sith, Tau or Rivix just steal it themselves. Sal-Deron and Krovos' security must suck!)

You travel to the coordinates specified by Jadus and find an odd derelict spaceship which is later revealed to be the "Enigma", formerly property of Darth Nul. You meet Jadus holding court there, posing in front of a throne and everything.

He's also traded his lobotomised cyborg followers from the base game for much cooler looking Sith troopers. In fact, it occurred to me that they look a bit like that Sith from the Disorder trailer who fights Sa'har and Master Orr before getting killed by Darth Malgus. Coincidence or extremely deep call-back? You decide!

When you quiz Jadus about what exactly he wants this time, he says that he wants to stop Malgus from using Darth Nul's machine (which Heta has already largely rebuilt, damn it) because it would just cause chaos and he wants to bring order to the galaxy. My real life reaction to this was "are you for real, bro" because wasn't Jadus' whole thing in the agent story that he also wanted to sow chaos and fear? I guess he might have changed his angle since then; I just would've liked to be able to comment on that as an agent at least. Either way, he wants you to unlock the full power of Darth Nul's holocron for him instead - fortunately what I thought as the only logical answer to that was available as a conversation option in this dialogue: that if the goal is to stop Malgus from using the machine, and the machine won't work without the holocron, surely not unlocking it and just keeping it away from everyone is the way to go?

To that he retorts that you haven't been very good at holding on to it recently, and your companion points out that you're perhaps not in the best position to pick a fight right now, considering how outnumbered you are. (We didn't fully think this one through, did we?) So you either agree to proceed into the depths of the ship to play around with whatever Nul left behind there to power up the holocron, or you briefly turn against Jadus and get to mow down some of his lackeys in a cool cut scene before he makes you pass out with the Force, causing you to reawaken deeper inside the ship either way.

What follows is a (to me) pretty interesting exploration/puzzle section. You investigate two biomes within the spaceship: The biome of balance is a pretty idyllic pastoral environment (it even has a nice fake blue sky box), while the biome of ferocity is an icky swamp filled with predators. Each one is guarded by a holographic remnant of Darth Nul, with the twist being that she split off different aspects of herself (one hologram is evil Sithy Nul, while the other still calls itself Master Ranaiah) and put each one in charge of the biome that doesn't align with that aspect's values.

In other words, you have evil Sithy Nul working on the balanced biome and being annoyed that the animals in it don't fight each other enough, and Jedi-minded Master Raniah locking up all the animals in the ferocity biome because she doesn't like them fighting and eating each other, causing them to quietly waste away in their pens instead. Your mission in each biome (and what makes up at least half of the gameplay in this update) is to talk to the Nul fragment holograms, figure out what's going on by reading some research notes, and then take actions to restore each biome to its originally intended state. Like I said, I found this quite interesting and I thought it did a good job of showing just how much of a mad scientist Darth Nul was. (Splitting off parts of your personality and then giving them tasks that are going to drive them nuts just to see what'll happen is pretty crazy.)

Once you've restored both biomes to a working state, the guardian holograms are satisfied and upload themselves to the Engima's mainframe. You proceed further into the bowels of the ship yourself, just to find the two holograms fighting and siccing their minions on each other inside. In an attempt to stop the chaos, you plug Darth Nul's holocron into a convenient nearby socket, and after some waiting and fighting off random minions (this bit was unfortunately buggy and confusing on launch) peace is restored and the two holograms are united into a single "personality matrix" representing Darth Nul.

She tells you once again about the machine and its purpose, and that she'd be able to help whoever has it to fine-tune its workings. She also reveals that its location is crucial to reaching as many Force sensitives across the galaxy as possible, and that if Elom is no longer available, the next best option would be the moon Khar Shian, which meant nothing to me personally but apparently has a lot of existing Old Republic lore attached to it. (Ted talks a bit about that in the most recent episode of the State of the Old Republic podcast.) So now you know where you'll find Heta, Shae and Malgus!

Naturally this is the time for a sudden and inevitable betrayal (if you agreed to work with Jadus at least), as he shows up to collect the holocron and leave you in the dust. The burns he delivers to an agent in particular are pretty harsh! However, there's a twist: he's not the only one that's betraying you, as Tau/Rivix are turning against you as well, trap you in a forcefield and hand the holocron over to Jadus willingly.

I guess Rivix being a turncoat shouldn't have been entirely surprising, considering he's always come across as kind of smarmy, though that doesn't mean that a betrayal at this particular moment was obvious. I actually played through the story on my Republic main first, however, and Tau's backstabbing was truly shocking to me and felt like it came completely out of left field. Fortunately she has a believable (if still frustrating) justification in that she's desperate to save Sa'har and thinks this is the way to make it happen. Naturally she's wrong about that though: Jadus doesn't give a shit and Force-lightnings her to... death? I literally went "nooo" at my screen, as I hated to see it, even with Tau just having betrayed me. It does turn out though that she's not actually dead, as Jadus and his minions decide to drag her not entirely lifeless body away with them - presumably he still has some sort of plan for her.

Meanwhile he leaves you behind in the forcefield trap, which is something that would seem foolish for a lot of villains but is totally in character for Jadus, who's more like a cat playing with a mouse. Why kill you outright when there's more fun to be had?

You actually manage to break out of the forcefield using sheer willpower and immediately pursue Jadus, though you get slowed down further, as nightmares of betrayers and former allies turned enemies invade your mind and force you to fight them.  

You reach Jadus' shuttle just as he's about to take off, and I'm not gonna lie, if it had been down to me I would've taken the L at that point and simply retreated to fight another day, but my character turned out to be a lot more persistent than me and pulled a rocket launcher out of nowhere in one final attempt to manually shoot the shuttle down. Shintar the trooper is even more of a badass than I thought! (As a Jedi or Sith you get to pull at the shuttle with the Force, which I guess is a little less crazy.) The attempt fails however, and you end up falling down and dangling off a piece of metal at the bottom of the ship like Luke under Cloud City at the end of Empire Strikes Back.

Fortunately you have allies that never listen to your instructions to stay behind, so either Arn or Anri show up with a shuttle to rescue you. Lana radios you from Odessen to let you know that your escape has been discovered and things are not good with the faction leaders, but you have another priority now: to go to Khar Shian. 

We conclude with a final look at what some of our antagonists have been up to in the meantime: Jadus attempts to make a deal with unknown terms with Heta Kol, Ri'kan attempts to get back into Heta's good graces by delivering Sa'har and gets threatened with a knife for his efforts (honestly, seeing her be as sick of his crap as I felt was very satisfying), and Malgus and Shae, too, have just found out that their next destination is Khar Shian by crushing a few more Hidden Chain soldiers. It's show time, baby! 

I know I've remained more positive about this storyline than a lot of (at least the loudest parts of) the player base, but I absolutely loved this update. I have criticised it in the past when it felt like an installment didn't really move the story forward much, but ever since Desperate Defiance we are definitely going somewhere, and Master's Engima continued this trend.

This particular story installment also really managed to hit me in the feels in so many places: the callback to being a simple trooper, the political drama, Jadus' machinations (you can tell that he'll use you and turn against you, but he does it in such a manner that it still burns) and the sudden betrayal by your companion. So many great moments!

I'm excited to see how it'll all wrap up in a week or so.