Is KotFE Keeping You Engaged?

In over four years of playing I've had my fair amount of ups and downs with SWTOR. When Bioware announced the first server merges I hated how they were handling the whole thing, and I loathed it when they originally announced the free-to-play conversion. Then there was the time my first guild died a slow death, or when my current guild had a reorganisation that left me out in the cold for a while. And of course there've always been periods where I got a bit bored of the game and focused on playing something else for a while. That's not really a problem per se, but a normal part of being an MMO player I think.

Still, I seem to be entering another one of these phases and I'm feeling oddly conflicted about it. I wasn't even sure if I should write about it at all, because sometimes not thinking about something actually does work and lets you brush it off more easily, but I've decided that this isn't one of these cases and that it's more likely to be the opposite - that I'll feel better after having gotten it off my chest.

Basically, I think it's KotFE. I still think that the story is great and all that, but, well... while I didn't think very highly of the people who loudly announced that they were going to rage-quit the moment Bioware revealed that they weren't going to release any new group content in the near future, I can sort of feel the effects of that design decision slowly creeping up on me by now, and on my guild as well. We still run operations every week, and I enjoy the variety, but nonetheless... It's been over a year since we last got a new operation and we still don't have an ETA for the next one. It does get a bit boring and it's noticeable that several guildies have been losing their lustre and aren't as interested in running ops anymore, not to even mention doing anything outside of ops nights.

I'm kind of joining their ranks to be honest (I probably spend more time writing about the game than actually playing it right now), but as I said above, I feel oddly conflicted about it. Part of me really wants to replay the KotFE story a couple more times. While being more attentive to every little detail for my Chapter by Chapter series, I've noticed all kinds of interesting tidbits that I missed the first two times around. (For example, look at the crowds to whom Arcann announces the Outlander's crimes at the end of chapter one and you'll spot some familiar faces.) And just how many times have I thought or said that I really need to get my agent into the new content so I can see what chapter seven and ten are like (which are particularly relevant to agents)? Yet every time I log on, I think of all the other chapters that I'll have to go through first... and then log off again.

I have one guildie who has completed KotFE and even the associated Alliance grind something like eight times or more and seems to have loved it, but I just... can't. It reminds me of this post I wrote literally just before the KotFE announcement about how all the new story stuff they'd released up to then was nice, but it's not fun to play through the exact same arc over and over again within a short period of time, especially alone. KotFE definitely suffers from the same problem, even if the devs tried to spice it up with class-specific bits of dialogue here and there.

The whole situation also reminds me of my relationship with Dragon Age: Origins, which was my first Bioware game and had a huge effect on me. After my first playthrough I found out that there was quite a bit of variety in the way things could pan out near the end, depending on your choices, and I kind of wanted to see them all, but I never actually managed to complete a second playthrough. I rolled up half a dozen alts to see all the different origin stories, but most of these characters didn't even make it past Ostagar (the first zone after the introduction). The few that did eventually pass that milestone then went off to die (figuratively) in the Deep Roads, a long zone full of tedious trash fights that just didn't seem worth the bother to me.

I suppose you could ask why it matters - if I'm happy to sub for one new chapter a month, I could just play that and then do something else the rest of the time, right? And it's true. But it just doesn't sit right with me that my "home MMO" should feel like there is nothing for me to do (that I want to do and that's also worth repeating), and as I said, part of me does want to tackle those additional story playthroughs. I just can't make up my mind whether the associated downsides are worth it or not.

Are you happy to re-play KotFE's chapters on all of your alts? If not, what else do you do to keep yourself entertained?