Shroud of Memory

HK bonus chapter day, hooray!
 

First off I have to say: While I think that this a really neat subscriber reward, it would be a real waste if an hour of such solid content was forever restricted to everyone who happened to be subbed at a certain time. Maybe they'll make it available as a cash shop purchase later on or something.

As it happened, the chapter and I weren't off to the greatest start (and from what I heard many people experienced the same problem): The initial dozen combat encounters or so were laggy as hell. So you're thrown into your first fight with a hotbar full of abilities you don't know, they don't seem to fire when you press them, and mobs are teleporting all over the place...  suckage! It's not as if you're about to die with an OP companion healing you, but you're just sort of waving your arms around ineffectively and it's not very satisfying. Fortunately things seemed to improve somewhat (at least for me) as the chapter progressed.

Also, I wasn't too enamoured with Z0-0M at first. It seemed like both her writer and her voice actor were trying way too hard to make her funny, to the point that she came across as just plain annoying. (I get that she's meant to be a nuisance to HK... but it's way too easy to sympathise with him.)

However, things got better. Some interesting bits of lore were revealed, and you progress through a couple of very fascinating environments, walking along the bottom of the ocean just to be shot up into space shortly afterwards. The things you can do when you're a droid...

Speaking of which, I found the general concept of playing as HK interesting, because I expect that this will open up more opportunities to play as a different character in the future. It seemed like HK was basically applied as a "skin" on top of your regular character. In the target of target window I was still labelled as Shintar, I always had combat support cell on, and various healing buffs procced during the fights. Also, I seemed to hit about as hard as a sponge - very inappropriate for an assassin droid - so I'm guessing that HK's combat abilities were somehow scaled off your usual damage numbers.

I was also delighted to find that your choices in the "Arma Rasa" recruitment mission seemed to be taken into consideration, as there was a moment where I selected the option to kill someone, but instead HK's hand only hovered above the button and he bemoaned his master's programming forbidding him to kill unarmed non-combatants.

And then of course there was the ending... this is where it could get a bit spoilery (though I'll still avoid being explicit)! I had somewhat mixed feelings about it. On the one hand it was quite an interesting twist... on the other hand it felt kind of disappointing to see an excellent villain whose portrayal had been 100% serious up until then be disposed of via such a slapstick move. I'm still kind of hoping that it was all just another trick by the real Shroud, though Z0-0M's description in the companion panel doesn't leave much hope.

Overall I quite enjoyed this chapter. The lag was my biggest annoyance, but presumably that will be fixed soon. It wasn't quite as funny as I had hoped after seeing some of the comments by the writers - I don't think there was a single lough-out-loud moment for me personally - but there were plenty of things to make you smile, and I realised that I've been missing that. Humour has always been an important part of Star Wars, and chapters ten to sixteen have mostly been pretty damn serious, with the exception of chapter thirteen's big heist. So yeah, it was good to poke a bit of fun at things again - I particularly liked what they did with the exarch in that regard.

Did you qualify for the bonus chapter? If so, what did you think of it? Or has the lag kept you away?