Agent Things

My little PvP project took up a lot of playtime over the past month, and as a result other activities such as my alt levelling have been somewhat neglected. Now that I'm taking a break from max-level PvP again, I'm having fun digging up a different alt each evening to seeing how they're doing. More than anything else I've been meaning to post an update on my lone Imperial agent on the Progenitor.

I was really keen to get to Alderaan to get my second companion. Imperial agents have to make do with a single companion for longer than any other class, and on my first agent I absolutely hated Kaliyo. As an Imperial loyalist, an anarchist like Kaliyo couldn't have made for worse company. She hated everything I did and it made no sense whatsoever that I even kept her around. So I could hardly wait to be able to replace her with Vector this time. But then something funny happened: She actually grew on me. Agent Shintar the cathar is no Imperial loyalist - she's selfish, suspicious of others and likes to sass people (which makes her slightly dark side but not overly so). In other words, she's actually a perfect match for Kaliyo! I keep gaining affection with her for everything I say and do and our interactions actually feel fluid and natural. So even as I got Vector and later Doctor Lokin, I've kept her by my side. Funny how these things go.

I had fun finishing off Alderaan by getting the explorer and datacron master achievements for that planet. Explorer also had a really annoying side though, as you need to get very close to House Organa to officially discover it, which meant that I repeatedly got ganked by level sixty guard droids and found myself forced to respawn at the closest Imperial med centre, which was half a planet away of course. I'm hoping that with Coffee's level syncing they will get rid of such huge differences in guard levels (since there will be no need to defend against overpowered gankers anymore), which should make exploring somewhat less punishing.

For datacron master it came in handy that I tend to be overlevelled for the planet I'm questing on, as at level 37 and by using my ability to stealth, I was just about able to sneak through the killik heroic area that's part of the Republic bonus series. Otherwise I would have been forced to come back to that later.

I was really keen to get chapter one done and over with. It's not bad, but it relies somewhat on suspense and deception, which doesn't work as well when you already know what's coming. More importantly, I wanted to get to the big decision at the end of chapter one. The Imperial agent story has a reputation for allowing for more genuinely branching paths than any of the other class stories, so I was curious to see what would happen if I sided with the bad guy this time. Don't worry, I'll keep it vague - no spoilers.

The point is that what happens at the end of the agent's chapter one is supposed to be such a big deal, you would expect there to be a huge difference in the way chapter two starts after that. Needless to say, I was extremely disappointed when the transition to chapter two appeared to be almost completely identical: the same person in charge, giving me the exact same follow-up mission in exactly the same way. Just one brief line on the side about how someone else was the big boss now. Pfft.

I think my disappointment with that played into me wanting to shelve my agent for a while after that. The only silver lining was that I got to execute a certain very annoying Darth. However, after having taken a bit of a break from the character again, I feel much better about the way the story is going, probably also because things pick up quite a bit as chapter two progresses. There are some interesting plot developments there, and I did actually catch a couple more lines that referenced the different chapter one ending and my changed status, which pleased me. The only other disappointment so far was that it seems to have made no difference that I left Watcher X alive on this playthrough, except that I obviously didn't get the conversation option to say: "You're supposed to be dead!" But I'm curious to see what other small (and maybe even bigger) changes are yet to come.