Playing Story Catch-up

With Galactic Season 4 in the rear-view mirror for now, I've been able to set myself some more free-form goals again. As I've noted previously, it's not unusual for me to feel the urge to focus on some actual character/story progression at this point in the "season cycle".

This time around, I got quite philosophical while thinking about the subject though.

I remember during the game's first few years, it was relatively easy to get caught up because obviously, there wasn't as much story content back then as there is now, but also, in the days before level sync you kind of had to do the new content on every character you actually wanted to level up.

Then level-sync came around, and while I did love the way SWTOR implemented it in general, it did kind of mess with the flow of levelling. (Fun fact: I still maintain that spreadsheet to keep track of which character has done what and it's a godsend.) Plus KotFE was not very fun to replay so there was even less incentive to actually get characters up to that point in the story and beyond.

Then we got the Dark vs. Light event which encouraged you to level lots of alts without any need to do the story, meaning I ended up with all these (close to) max-level characters that hadn't really done anything other than run some flashpoints and participate in PvP and GSF. I really did not do well with progressing any of these alts in terms of story either.

My interest in making some progress on that front was revived for a bit when Bioware first made the change that made it possible to earn Conquest points by just doing story content, but that didn't last for long, and then Galactic Seasons were introduced and since then it's been mayhem as I constantly feel compelled to jump through the hoops provided by the seasons objectives instead of focusing on other things.

I had a closer look at my story progression spreadsheet and honestly, for as much as I claim to love SWTOR's story content, my progress over the past few years has been pretty pathetic. KotFE and KotET came out in 2015/16, yet it took me until 2020 to get one of every class/origin story through that bit of content. Since then I've tried to keep those eight roughly up to date with the current story, but I've not even been very consistent with that. I mean, I don't expect to get all of them through every new patch within a week - that would be pretty repetitive and boring - but I realised that a couple of them had barely even started on the 7.0 story yet.

And the alts stuck before the Knights expansions have it even worse! Many of them are barely any younger/newer than those "main eight", and yet an astounding number of them never even did the Shadow of Revan expansion. Content that came out almost a decade ago!

So my personal goal for the time being is to get all the characters that are meant to be caught up with current content actually up to the current content (aka patch 7.3), and to make a bit of a push to get a second of each origin story through KotFE and KotET. Now, that one's still going to be difficult and somewhat repetitive, so I'm not setting myself a deadline here, but I want to at least make a bit of an effort. I mean, how did I get three smugglers through KotFE but only one knight, consular and inquisitor? Those expansions aren't even that bad on those classes.

I tried to date my previous playthroughs by referring to old screenshots, and it was interesting to see that while I got seven characters through KotFE and KotET within three years of those expansions first coming out, I didn't play through either expansion even once in 2019 and 2021. I can do better than that!

(And yes, I get that if you're a more casual SWTOR player who rarely even does any of the story content on more than one character, all this might sound a bit insane, but for me this is my main game and I love my stable of alts. I can definitely do more with them than I have been doing.)