Three Things I Miss About Knights of the Fallen Empire

Back in October, Knights of the Fallen Empire turned ten years old - which is wild to me, when I still tend to think of it as a sort of dividing line between old SWTOR and new SWTOR. New stuff isn't supposed to be a decade old! There was an interesting reddit thread on the subject at the time, with many people reminiscing about what they liked and disliked about the expansion.

I briefly considered writing a post on the subject as well, but ultimately decided against it because I was worried that it would just devolve into me rehashing all my gripes about KotFE for the umpteenth time, and god knows I've done enough of that on this blog.

However, I recently started another alt on KotFE for the first time in a couple of years, and it actually made me realise that there are at least a few things that I really liked about that expansion and that I kind of miss now. This doesn't affect me still not being too hot on KotFE and KotET as a whole, but I thought it might make for a fun post to give some credit where credit is due.

1. Our characters getting to look cool, often

What really got me thinking about this one actually wasn't just my newest KotFE playthrough, but also the release of Galactic Threads. One of my immediate reactions to my first playthrough of the latter was that I was pleasantly surprised by how many opportunities the story presented to take screenshots of my character looking cool.

One of the best things about KotFE, if not the best thing, was how dramatically it improved the in-game cut scenes, and it made use of these new tools by giving us a lot of shots of our characters looking badass, whether they were involved in action scenes, looking determined or just brandishing their weapons. If you're someone who takes screenshots at all, you must have at least one of your character pulling out their weapon in chapter five of KotFE while Lana and Senya raise their own lightsabers next to you. Or how about your various confrontations with Arcann? Lots of cool moments there.

Now, that technology never went away, but after thinking about it, it does feel to me like we've gotten fewer cool shots of our characters in the last couple of years, with much of the cut scene energy getting channeled into NPCs like Sa'har or Malgus instead (at least until Galactic Threads). So that's something I didn't even really realise I was missing, until I was delighted to get more of it again.

2. Frequent story updates

Look, I'm not even going to go into the chapter format, its mechanics and the story quality - but it's undeniable that for a while at least, we got a story update close to every month. I don't think it was worth the trade-off of ignoring everything else, but it was something. In hindsight, it seems deeply ironic that this was also a time when the community complained incessantly that there was "no content" and "nothing to do". And yes, I know that a lot of those complaints were about endgame activities in specific, but still. Pure story players at least were eating well for a while.

It's also funny to remember that the whole "one chapter a month" thing was dropped again pretty quickly with the justification that people didn't want to wait a whole month between story updates, because that was too long. *looks at Legacy of the Sith and gesticulates helplessly*

3. The world and community felt alive

Maybe re-reading some of FibroJedi's old posts gave me rose-tinted glasses, or maybe it was simply because there wasn't anything other than story going on at the time, but I seem to remember the community being very engaged with Knights of the Fallen Empire's story, with many people blogging about their thoughts, speculating what might happen next, and so on and so forth.

While I do recall some complaints that chapters ten to fourteen in particular weren't really moving the story forward enough, in general it felt like there was always something happening in the galaxy from a story perspective. Ultimately we ended up speed-running both the rise and fall of the Eternal Empire within less than two years. This is a stark contrast to the current (Legacy of the Sith) era, where it feels like nothing much has happened, narrative-wise, for the last four years. Or as Ted put it the other week: "I feel like time stands still in SWTOR, or at the very least, it moves slowly."

I think that as a side effect of this, the community has become less and less engaged with the current storyline over time. At least in my circle of friends, I don't know many who rush to play the newest story update the moment it comes out anymore. There seems to be a bit of a sense of "nothing's going to happen that's so important that I feel like I need to see it for myself as soon as possible". I also don't see many other fans producing story reviews like I do, though I feel like Galactic Threads has got people at least a bit more curious again after the long enforced break due to the voice actors' strike.

I'm hoping that as we're starting to wrap up Legacy of the Sith and get a new "era" to look forward to, these developments will add a breath of fresh air both to our characters' in-game day-to-day lives and to the community's engagement with what's new in a galaxy far, far away.