Legacy Reborn's Potential Gameplay Implications

I'm really keen to do a full review of Legacy Reborn's story, but I think I'll need a few more playthroughs for that, so in the meantime I'd like to talk about another topic related to 7.9's story update. I originally meant to post this after the review, but it's much easier to write so I'll do it first.

Note that this will still contain spoilers for Legacy Reborn's ending, so don't read on if that's something you want to avoid!

So the story ends with Malgus activating Heta Kol's machine to call out to the galaxy's Force users whether we like it or not, which will surely have a major impact on 8.0's primary narrative. However, as someone with a trooper main there was a detail in the final cut scene that I found very interesting: our previously purely tech using classes are affected by the machine's call as well and suddenly feel the Force, which is reflected in our character reflexively holding back a rock that's about to fall down on our heads.

I didn't manage to take a screenshot on my main, but here's the equivalent moment on my agent alt. 

Now, I didn't think that was too big a deal initially - while I've always been adamant that I don't want my main to be a Force user and disliked the way KotFE treated all player characters largely as if they were, that storyline did also leave us with every character displaying at least a bit of Force sensitivity in the story, as evidenced by things like the extra action button in KotFE chapter 12 that lets you tame an animal companion for part of your journey, or the way you reflexively shield yourself against Arcann's attacks in the final confrontation with him at the end of chapter 16.

I don't think it's ever been made explicitly clear whether that was just Valkorion using his powers while he was possessing us or whether he left us with a degree of "residual" Force sensitivity anyway even after being expelled. Either way, our character holding back a rock was definitely a step up in power levels (lifting rocks isn't easy, just ask Flingeld) but still, it's not like we're suddenly all Jedi or Sith now. I do trust the devs enough that I'm pretty sure we won't suddenly be shoehorned into that in 8.0, though I can imagine our sudden enhanced abilities coming up in conversation.

I did find myself wondering how having a stronger sense of the Force would affect my character's combat abilities, concluding that she'd still be using her weapon primarily but could maybe learn a few Force tricks to help her out along the way. And she would just be one of many in the same predicament.

Which then got me thinking about combat styles! We know that we're never going to get a new origin story, but since 7.0 split classes into origin stories and combat styles, a new combat style seemed a lot more doable. Most of the time I've seen people talk about how they'd like to have a tech class with a blade, similar to how some companions already work (e.g. Tanno Vik or Broonmark), but I realised that Legacy Reborn instead feels like the perfect setup for a tech combat style with some Force abilities.

The great thing about that would be that unlike giving tech users a blade, it would still be fully compatible with the existing story cut scenes since you'd still have the same weapon, the Force abilities would just be an extra thing to use outside cut scenes.

There would be some kinks to work out - they'd have to make it possible to change combat styles for one thing, as currently you can only add a second one but then you're stuck, and many players probably already have two. Plus from a story point of view it would be weird for a new character to be a Force-using smuggler on Ord Mantell I guess, so maybe there'd need to be some kind of restriction on when you can start using this new combat style? Then again, it's probably no weirder than Jedi shooting lightning on Tython, which is also allowed now, so...

I don't know whether I'm just building castles in the sky thinking about this, but it just seems like such an obvious idea once you think about it, I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone else bring it up yet. I'm very curious to hear what else the devs officially announce for 8.0 now that 7.9's cat is out of the bag so to speak. 

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. 

10 Moments in SWTOR's History for Which You Had to Be There

Star Wars: The Old Republic is primarily know for its developer-crafted stories, but any player who's engaged with the social side of the game for any length of time knows that there are also community-driven stories and dramas, and moments when you simply had to be there to know what made them so exciting, even if some of the related content is still available in the game today. As someone who's been a subscriber since early access and never stopped playing, I thought it would be fun to share some of the most interesting moments I remember with my readers, especially with newer ones who may not have been playing as long.

Note: If you've never played through some of the expansion storylines, some of the later items on this list will contain story spoilers.

The /getdown bug

Going chronologically, let's start with a story with which I amused my guildies one night. Back when the game launched, you could apparently do dance emotes in combat, and someone quickly discovered that doing /getdown would suddenly prevent opponents from attacking. This was actually picked up by several gaming news sites at the time, both because SWTOR was the newest hotness in town and because the mere idea of enemies being stunned into inaction by your dancing skills was a very funny thing to write headlines about.

I never saw this bug in action myself, but I did come across this comic on social media at the time which made me laugh so much that I saved it:

Click to enlarge and read properly. I wish I could credit the original artist (Minicrit?) with a link, but alas, RIP Google Plus.

The big PvP debacle on original Ilum

Another thing that made headlines around launch was the planet Ilum and the PvP taking place there. You see, the western ice shelf where the Gree visit nowadays used to be a dedicated PvP area. This brief video by Force Gaming should give you an idea of how it was supposed to work. It was released about two weeks after launch, and the video notes that at the time, people were just flipping objectives and not much PvP was going on. This was "fixed" with a patch... that in turn broke the area in a whole bunch of other ways. The result were crazy AoE fests that the game's engine couldn't deal with very well, which caused people to gain valour way too fast, even as they were just dying over and over in the mayhem. It was just chaos and caused endless complaints.

Once again, this is something I didn't actually get to experience directly, as I took my time levelling and didn't get to Ilum until about three months later, by which time all the craziness had already died down. In January 2013, I actually wrote a post called "The strangeness of Ilum a year later", but in those first weeks after launch, it was seemingly all people would talk about on forums and news sites, about how this newly launched MMO clearly didn't know how to deal with PvP and was therefore already failing horribly.

The original Rakghoul event

The recurring Rakghoul Resurgence event is probably old hat to most of you at this point - just another world event that comes around every so often and which has been around for what feels like forever. The very first Rakghoul event in April 2012 though... that was something else. The activities it came with weren't really any more exciting than what we have in the repeating event, but the vibe was very different and unique, mainly because we had no idea it was coming.

The game was still very new at the time, had a lot going on and we were getting patches and updates about more patches all the time... but this came as a complete surprise, and the experience of everyone being confused about what was going on and slowly figuring things out over the course of the first day was unique and exciting in a way that I think is hard to convey nowadays. You can read the blog post I wrote about it at the time to get an idea though. (I also wrote two follow-ups.)

Ultimately the fact that it was a time-limited one-off was also one of the biggest criticisms Bioware received, which is why they eventually swapped to making new events recurring. The Rakghouls would eventually join the rotation in early 2014.

The Grand Acquisitions Race

The Grand Acquisitions Race (sometimes also referred to as "the Chevin event") was SWTOR's second one-time world event, and a lot less exciting than the original Rakghoul incursion on Tatooine. One reason for this was that we actually knew that it was coming, even if we didn't know the details. The second reason however was that it was simply a lot less exciting in terms of activities, as all there was to do was a time-gated puzzle quest chain and farming currency crates on Nar Shaddaa. I have to chuckle a bit when I occasionally see people say that this event should be brought back. People didn't even care about it that much when the game was still in its heyday and a limited-time world event was something exciting! Still, I guess my point is you had to be there to know just how underwhelming it really was.

The return of Revan

I think this one might be a bit hard to parse for anyone who started playing after 2014. We all know Revan is in the game, right? There's a whole expansion called "Shadow of Revan", no? Well, for a moment, try to imagine that there wasn't. Revan is in the game, but only in this weird side quest that you'll only see if you like doing group content, and he's a prisoner one moment and a genocidal maniac the next, and if you blink you'll miss him dying as well. Also note that you had to have levelled through and done group content on both factions to be able to make sense of this brief cameo, something which fans of the original KotOR were not at all happy about.

Then it's 2014 - we've been level 55 for a bit over a year, got several new daily areas and raids, everything's kind of chugging along nicely if you're not dying for your character's personal story to be continued... and then we start getting a new series of flashpoints that's being promoted as a new story arc called "Forged Alliances". That Theron guy is kinda cute, but aside from that it's all a bit mysterious. Who are these new troublemakers in the shadows? The answer came in September, in a post in which I felt the need to give a spoiler warning.

Whoa, Revan is back? Revan is alive? Is it really him though? And then a whole expansion with his name! It was exciting times for a while, showing once again that Revan's name still attracted the crowds. I think reception of the expansion storyline was ultimately a bit mixed - it gave the character a better send-off than the base game had for sure, but it was still a bit awkward in the eyes of some.

The launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire

Did you realise that we're less than a month away from the KotFE expansion turning ten years old? I'm sure I'm not the only long-time player who still thinks of everything pre-KotFE as the good old days, and everything that came after it as "the new stuff". It is after all a fact that it changed the game in bigger ways than perhaps anything that came afterwards, with the introduction of features like level sync or its complete overhaul of the companion system.

Still, I'm not even talking about all of that. What made KotFE's launch a "you had to be there" moment was just how absolutely insane the hype was. A new CGI trailer for the first time since launch! Accidental leaks with announcements that could be interpreted in multiple possible ways! General Star Wars hype as we were all looking forward to the sequel trilogy! (Oops.) Absolute mayhem!

And when it came out, people (including me) did indeed love it! Mainstream gaming sites were like "hey, this game still exists and is good"! It felt like we were all set for a big SWTOR renaissance... except it all fizzled out within a couple of months. People thought the story was neat, but they didn't want to hang around to wait for one new chapter per month. They felt there wasn't enough to do at endgame. And those of us who did stick around quickly found out how tedious the new story was to play through on alts, never mind the plot going in directions that became more and more aggravating. For the second time in its life, SWTOR had released (something) with a lot of hype and then failed to live up to it.

Galactic Command

For anyone who might not know, Galactic Command was a new gearing/endgame progression system introduced with the Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion, and in its original iteration, it was the worst system of its kind that I've personally ever seen. To add insult to injury, people (including me) were telling them from the moment it was announced that it was a bad idea, but the devs were all "nah, it'll work and be fun, you'll see".

It didn't and it wasn't. For me, the early days of Galactic Command were one of my all-time low points with the game. Fortunately the devs scrambled to fix it immediately after launch, but it took about six months to get it into what could be described as an "acceptable" state and many players held a grudge long after. It's another one of those things that in hindsight makes you wonder what could've been sooo bad about it, but if you were there, you know.

Theron's betrayal

I did say there were spoilers in here, didn't I? I think looking at the game's storylines as a whole, the Fractured Alliances story (consisting of the three flashpoints Crisis on Umbara, Traitor Among the Chiss and The Nathema Conspiracy) is probably not among many people's favourites. The writing definitely felt like it had dug itself into a bit of a hole with Knights of the Eternal Throne, and it wasn't clear how it was going to get out of it.

I actually think that Fractured Alliances ultimately succeeded in what it set out to do, but it's fair to say that it was a bumpy ride. One thing I really did enjoy about it though was the community interactions it created. Theron's betrayal in Crisis on Umbara was not well-received for a variety of reasons, but it was interesting to watch the conversation around it evolve as more people started to believe that the whole thing was just a ruse. In hindsight, there are some hints towards this from the beginning, but they were easy to overlook at first.

People just didn't want their love interest to betray them, and there was even a hashtag called #believeintheron making the rounds on Twitter. I remember seeing screenshots of people assembling on Odessen with all their Therons out and forming a heart-shape or something. I just thought that was very cool, and actually kind of made me more invested in the final outcome than the story itself would have been able to do on its own.

Darth Malgus' return

Back in 2017, I wrote a post called "11 NPCs That Died Before Their Time" and Darth Malgus was second on my list. I just couldn't believe that they put him in all the cinematic trailers and then simply had him get killed off in one of the first endgame flashpoints! I'm not sure I was aware at the time that there was a supposedly deleted scene from the KotFE trailer that showed Malgus being delivered to Valkorion, frozen in a block of carbonite. Even if I was, it seemed obvious at the time that they'd deleted it for a reason and for all intents and purposes, Malgus was still considered dead.

When he really did come back with the Ossus update at the end of 2018, I absolutely loved it. It was a really well-presented surprise, and while I don't think it was as big as the return of Revan, for me personally it was actually more meaningful than that had been. It's hard to think that it's already been seven years since then - at this point it feels like it should be obvious to everyone playing the game in any capacity at all that Darth Malgus is alive. However, that moment when we first found out was definitely special. (Cue some comment about how he's unfortunately outstayed his welcome since then.)

Move to Broadsword

Two years ago, when IGN leaked the news that Star Wars: The Old Republic was going to be transferred from Bioware to some largely unknown studio called Broadsword Entertainment, all hell broke loose in the community for a few weeks. I think dedicated SWTOR players are quite used to endless doom-saying about the game and are well-practised at ignoring it by this point, but this sounded serious, and it was not at all clear what the consequences were going to be.

To me it was probably more worrying than even the original free-to-play announcement had been, and I found myself seeking solace in spending a lot more time than usual talking to fellow content creators. I also felt compelled to try and do my own part by practising something vaguely resembling journalism, which meant assembling information from different sources and trying to put it into context for people. In hindsight it seems almost silly how much we worried, considering how little changed from a player perspective after the studio transition, but at the time it was big news.

Runner-ups:

I could've tried to come up with even more stories, but I thought that 10 was a good number to stop at. Nonetheless, here are three more events that I considered mentioning but decided against because they were mostly negative but also ultimately not that interesting to talk about in detail in my opinion:

• The original free-to-play transition
• The Legacy of the Sith expansion launch
• The whole character texture update drama

Which of all of these events were you personally around for? Do you agree with my characterisation of how things went down? Are there any other major events in the game's history that you would've included on this list?

When Will We Get 8.0? Will We Ever?

This was a topic that I discussed with Ivano on the podcast, but I still wanted to write a blog post about it as well, since it's something that's been on my mind for a while. With it having been more than two and a half years since the launch of Legacy of the Sith, it's also a question I'm seeing people ask more and more.

The short answer is: We don't really know. If it's happening, it's unlikely to be soon. As of me writing this in September 2024, we have no official information on the subject. No, that post on Today in TOR was an April Fools joke.

Now for the long answer.

The problem with talking about future expansions for SWTOR is that it has never had what I would call a regular expansion cycle akin to other long-running MMOs, where you can count on a new expansion pack being announced once a year or every other year.

If we look back at the game's early years, we did get expansions at something close to a yearly pace for a while: Rise of the Hutt Cartel came out in early 2013, Shadow of Revan at the end of 2014, Knights of the Fallen Empire in late 2015, and Knights of the Eternal Throne at the end of 2016. That may actually seem kind of regular at a glance, but it wasn't really. RotHC was originally meant to be free content for subscribers but was later repackaged as an expansion. Then we got Galactic Starfighter towards the end of 2013 and Galactic Strongholds in mid-2014, and while people tend to not think of those additions as expansions nowadays, they were marketed as such at the time, meaning that for a while we were getting a major content drop almost every six months. Shadow of Revan actually felt kind of cut short, seeing how it was only current content for less than a year.

Then Knights of the Fallen Empire came around, promising to completely change the game from the ground up, and it did indeed introduce many changes that impact our gameplay to this day, such as level scaling and companions being way more powerful than they were in the game's first three years. The flow from Fallen Empire chapters into Eternal Throne on the other hand was so gradual it made the two feel almost like a single expansion... and then it just stopped.

I think it was around this time that I remember a dev saying that they weren't even sure they were going to do expansions anymore because they might just keep adding regular content patches without all that hullabaloo instead. They did eventually change their minds about that, but Onslaught didn't come out until the end of 2019 almost three years later.

When Legacy of the Sith was announced for late 2021, it felt like the team was really getting back into the groove, but then 7.0 turned into a big flop. (To be clear, I think they've released a lot of good content since then, but 7.0 at launch was just underwhelming in a lot of ways.)

And that's really the crux of the matter as I see it. People (both players and developers) like MMO expansions because they generate hype, promise exciting new things and give lapsed players a reason to check back in. From a developer's point of view, they can also be used to charge extra for a big bundle of content all at once.

However, SWTOR hasn't benefitted from that last one since 2014, seeing how they've never wavered from their "all content unlocks with the subscription" model that was introduced with KotFE in 2015. And well... Legacy of the Sith was great for hype before it launched, but then not so much. Those Twitch numbers I looked at the other day showed engagement with the game dropping to a two-year-low shortly after the expansion's launch, kind of the opposite of what you want out of a big release like that!

A really terrible expansion can harm your game just as much as a good one can lift it up; it's not an automatic win. I never played Rift myself for example, but from everything I've heard, interest in that game absolutely tanked with the first expansion because the new content went into completely the wrong direction for the player base it had built. And of course there's always Star Wars Galaxies' infamous New Game Experience. Legacy of the Sith was fortunately not on that level and interest in SWTOR seemingly recovered around the time 7.1 came out, but I still think it was a close call and reminded everyone that a bad expansion can actually be worse than no expansion at all.

The point of all this waffling is that SWTOR has never had a regular expansion cycle due to the many changes in direction it's had over time, and with the current business model it doesn't actually benefit from an expansion nearly as much as many other MMOs. While the team at Broadsword seems happy with their new home and has been doing a solid job continuing to pump out content, they are still small and I'm honestly not sure whether it would be the best use of their resources to reduce work on the regular patches in favour of building up to a bigger release again.

It's not that I wouldn't love to see another good expansion, but after the dud that was LotS' launch, I really don't want to see them mess up like that again either. I had a decent enough time in 7.0, but seeing how unhappy it made many players and listening to the game get panned left and right was no fun at all. If they are going to give us another expansion, I feel it needs to at least match Onslaught in terms of scope, which launched with a new playable species, two planets, distinct storylines for Republic and Empire, a new flashpoint and a new operation. If they can't honestly commit to that, I'd rather they stuck to focusing on giving us the best possible new content from one patch to the next, even if that doesn't get them as much press as an expansion launch would. Just raising the level cap by five again and revamping the way gearing works for the umpteenth time in order to call it an expansion would do the game more harm than good in my eyes.

Getting KotFE Flashbacks in the New WoW Expansion

So World of Warcraft has a new expansion out, and Mr Commando and I have been playing it for the past few days. Why am I writing about that on my SWTOR blog? Because new WoW expansions have a weird way of reminding me of The Old Republic, that's why!

Two years ago I wrote a post about how I keep noticing familiar voices from SWTOR in other media, and I cited the then-new WoW expansion Dragonflight as an example, as it featured the female trooper as a dragon and Senya as a centaur. This new expansion is even worse though, because not only does it feature some familiar voices, but the residents of the new land you travel to call you "Outlander".

What I thought was the ultimate flashback moment arrived when I made it to the second zone and there's this cut scene of a pompous rock dwarf leader making an appearance, and he starts his speech by yelling "Outlanders!". That really took me back right there, as the voice also seemed familiar and I could've sworn that I had the exact same guy yell "Outlander!" at me before in one of the Knights expansions.

I couldn't quite place my finger on it though, and while a guildie had some suggestions as to who the voice actor might be, that still didn't answer my question of which character in KotFE or KotET he reminded me of. It wasn't until the next morning as I was about to get on a train when it suddenly came to me: the leader of the Heralds of Zildrog! I immediately pulled up a YouTube video of the encounter and yep, there was that familiar voice. I guess it makes sense that this would fire up recognition in my brain, considering that he voices what's effectively a conceited cult leader in both instances.

I still can't say with 100% certainty that it's the same guy since I can't find full voice credits for The War Within at this point, but assuming that it's indeed the same voice actor, the Exalted in KotFE is credited as Fred Tatasciore, who was also the new voice for Tanno Vik and apparently... Doctor Oggurobb? Huh!

Anyway, that moment was a particular stand-out but there have been others. Darin De Paul (Valkorion) is as prolific as ever and lends his voice to more than a few random rock dwarves. And just as I was starting to wonder whether they hadn't managed to include Jennifer Hale anywhere this time, she popped up as the voice of a random blacksmith. It's just something that tickles me. Have you encountered familiar voices elsewhere lately?

I will be writing more about the WoW expansion on my WoW blog by the way. Just in case you're interested (and/or didn't know that was a thing).

My 7 Favourite Post-Launch Story Updates

Over the years, a lot has been said and written about the merits of each of the different class stories, but there's been comparatively little discourse about the expansion stories from what I've seen - which I think is a shame, because in my opinion there's some pretty good stuff in there. Obviously, no single storyline can live up to the eight original class stories in terms of sheer breadth of unique content, but that aside, I disagree with the general sentiment I often see expressed that those stories were the peak of the game's storytelling and that it's all just been downhill from there. The more cinematic cut scenes post Knights of the Fallen Empire have been so much more exciting to watch than anything in the original class stories, and many of the non-player characters that were introduced in later years are much more interesting than the vast majority of NPCs we interacted with in the base game.

With all that said, I wanted to write a bit of a love letter to some of my favourite expansion stories. Back in 2019 I wrote a post called "Good Quest, Bad Quest" in which I laid out what I think makes an MMO quest good or bad, and those are the main items that influenced my ranking of these stories as well: presentation, writing, plot, characters, gameplay and world building.

Honestly, the most difficult thing was to decide what actually counts as a separate story. In the past it was pretty clear-cut for the most part, but ever since Ossus the game's ongoing storyline has been a bit of a never-ending soap opera in which different plot beats get picked up and dropped again without necessarily coming to a proper conclusion. You could argue that it's basically all been "the Malgus saga" since then, but I don't entirely agree with that as everything around Onslaught (and somewhat randomly, the Manaan part of Legacy of the Sith) has felt more like a classic and mostly self-contained Republic vs. Empire story to me, while I tend to think of Echoes of Oblivion as a stand-alone adventure that referenced a lot of older content. Spirit of Vengeance involved the Mandalorians for the first time, but then the focus kept ping-ponging between them and Malgus again.

Anyway, I obviously decided to make some choices in regards to the above; this is just to add some context.

1. Jedi Under Siege (2018)

Also known as Ossus or the prelude to Onslaught, released with patch 5.10. There was never going to be any doubt in my mind that this was going to take the top spot on my list, because I loved this update so frikkin' much. Seriously, if you go back to the blog archives from December 2018, every other post is just me gushing about some aspect of this update or another that I loved.

I'd yearned for a return to Republic vs. Empire after Knights of the Eternal Throne, and while Iokath had paid lip-service to this, it had also been done in an extremely lacklustre way, just to then immediately steer away from the subject again to pivot into what would later become known as "the traitor arc". Comparatively, Jedi Under Siege felt like a return to form, the likes of which we hadn't seen since the base game. Ossus was a beautiful planet that made it a joy to explore again, something that hadn't really been the case with the very limited environments of the "Knights of" expansions and Iokath's confusing architecture.

We were introduced to several new and interesting characters in the form of Tau Idair, General Daeruun and Major Anri, and several companion returns that people had been anticipating for many years were skilfully worked into the story in an organic way (Doc, Nadia, Khem Val). On top of that other minor characters made surprise re-appearances, such as Jonas Balkar from the trooper story, NR-02 from the Black Talon, or Darth Malora from Korriban.

Not to mention that Malgus came back! You may be tired of him now after watching him sit around and mope for the last two years, but back then I thought this was a genius move and a fun surprise. And of course, the storylines for Republic and Empire side were different and well-written. I just had a blast all around with this content and am always happy to revisit it on alts. The fact that it takes place on an open world planet instead of constantly shunting you through instanced corridors feels very liberating, and I enjoy seeing the little variations in dialogue depending on what class you play and whether you had any pre-existing relationship with any of the returning NPCs.

2. Onslaught (2019)

In this context I'm talking about the story content that came with the immediate 6.0 expansion launch, meaning the story on Onderon and Mek-Sha plus the finale in the Objective Meridian flashpoint.

Onslaught honestly repeated a lot of what Jedi Under Siege did, only with some minor flaws. We quested our way through two new planets again, met some interesting new and returning characters (Arn, Darth Savik, Jakarro and D4, to name but a few) and once again saw things from different perspectives depending on our faction and to some degree our class (getting the option to reclaim your Dark Council seat as a Sith inquisitor was fire). It just wasn't... quite as good. For example the Republic story on Onderon suffers a bit from your senator liaison being a bit boring, and on Mek-Sha too much of the content for both factions overlaps, but it's still a storyline that I love to replay.

3. Makeb (2013)

This the storyline from which the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion got its name, except the Hutts don't really get to rise very much at all before you slap them down again. They came in 2.0 and went within the same patch. This is a piece of content on which my opinion has changed a lot over time. Initially I liked it well enough, but the mobs on Makeb were quite numerous and tough at launch, and replays quickly started to feel like a slog. Not to mention that it was being sold to us as chapter four of our class stories for a while when it very obviously wasn't that.

However, considering how much smaller expansions got in the years afterwards, I've really grown fond of our adventures on Makeb in retrospect. We get to explore a large, picturesque planet over the course of a pretty meaty storyline, and it's totally different for Republic and Empire side as well. The Imperial storyline is admittedly a lot stronger, since the Republic one feels a bit odd with the whole "the planet is about to blow up" threat never seeming entirely convincing, but it's not terrible either. It's where we first meet Doctor Oggurobb after all.

4. Shadow of Revan (2014)

I'm mainly thinking of the actual 3.0 expansion launch story here, though I wouldn't blame anyone for wanting to include the Forged Alliances story arc that formed the prelude to the expansion; I'd just personally treat that as its own thing. I'm also not really including the Rise of the Emperor patch here, since that had nothing to do with Revan anymore really. 

Many people cite this as their favourite expansion, but as I've stated many times before, I think it's somewhat overrated. That doesn't mean that I think it's bad however, not at all! Again, we got to quest our way through two beautiful new planets, Rishi and Yavin IV, and the tale of battling the Revanites and their new-old leader was compelling enough. There were some bits that fell a little flat for me, but I did enjoy the story overall.

It's also the expansion that had us start our adventures with Theron and Lana in earnest (including the option for some romance), which I guess is a big plus for some, though it's been more of a mixed blessing to me personally. I know many people love Lana, but if you think Malgus is worn out as a character, imagine how those of us feel who aren't crazy about Lana and yet have had to listen to her tell us what to do for over a decade now...

5. Echoes of Oblivion (2020)

I hesitated a bit to put this one here because I actually don't necessarily think that this is a great piece of content to replay on multiple characters, which is something that is quite important to me. The final boss fight is (in my opinion) one of the worst in the game and the whole thing is pretty linear without any meaningful variations based on your faction or class. However! In terms of world building, this storyline did so much to tie up several years worth of annoying loose ends that I can't not list it here as a piece of content that was very meaningful to me when it came out. It just felt like a love letter to the game's lore in a big way, trying hard to improve on all kinds of tidbits that had felt a bit unsatisfying in the past. Plus hanging out with Kira and Scourge was fun. I wrote a longer review about it back then, which you can find here.

6. Legacy of the Sith or Whatever It Is We're Doing Right Now (2020-?)

As mentioned in the intro, it's very hard to pin down a clear start and end point for this one, but personally I see what I'm talking about here as starting with the introduction of the Mando plot in Spirit of Vengeance in patch 6.2 and then pretty much everything that comes afterwards, except maybe the storyline on Manaan since that doesn't really tie into anything to do with the Mandalorians or Malgus. I'm also treating this placement as tentative since I'm not sure whether 7.5 will turn out to be a real cut-off - I suspect not, so future updates might change my opinion on this storyline. It's honestly been a bit of a ride, and I know many players have understandably been put off by the sheer amount of real time that has passed while all of this has been going on. But I still like the storyline because it has given us both new flashpoints and multiple new planetary areas in terms of gameplay, plus it's had a lot of what I think is great character writing. I'm really interested in seeing where things go with 7.6!

7. Oricon (2013)

Technically part of the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion and only a short side story, I liked patch 2.4's "The Dread War" for giving us a cool daily area and bringing the story of the Dread Masters to a satisfying conclusion. The plot and writing are pretty basic - here are some really scary bad guys, we need to beat them - but it showed us how something that isn't technically part of the main storyline about our character could still result in a really interesting and enjoyable story update.

I'm going to stop here because after this point, I think I'd start to be a bit more grouchy about the storylines that remain, and this is meant to be a positive post! You might be surprised by some of the things I haven't listed - I know the "Knights of" expansions have their fans for example, but I'm not one of them to be honest. You can read more about why here if you want.

If you've played through all the expansion content to date, how much do you agree/disagree with my rankings? Is there a post-launch storyline that I didn't mention here and that you feel is really underrated perhaps? Feel free to chime in in the comments.

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.)

Yet Another Smuggler Fights the Eternal Empire

A few weeks ago I made the decision to start my Gunslinger Talara on Knights of the Fallen Empire. This was a bigger step for me than you might think.

You see, Talara was the first smuggler I ever created (back in 2012), and was pretty important to me as an alt for a while. She was part of a levelling duo with a friend during the game's early days, though unfortunately SWTOR didn't stick for him. At max level, she was the first character on whom I actually tried to learn how to do a proper dps rotation. And when Knights of the Fallen Empire was announced, I got her all caught up with the story and was ready to use her to see the new expansion from a smuggler's point of view.

Of course, the KotFE chapters turned out to not be a lot of fun to replay, and the story didn't seem like a good fit for a smuggler at all, so I moved her to the back of the queue. Then the Dark vs. Light event came out and required that we all start new characters of every class from scratch and take them through a bunch of content. As it happened, the smuggler I made for this purpose ended up being the character I played all the way through KotFE for the sake of the achievement. Of course, also taking Talara after that seemed a bit redundant at that point.

And so she has lingered behind, watching the level cap go up again and again. I usually got her to the new cap doing whatever, but in terms of story progression she was forever frozen in time at the end of Ziost. I just didn't want to make that leap - yet at the same time that lack of play made me feel increasingly estranged from the character, which was a bit of a shame. Especially as she's super cute!

Funnily enough, Galactic Season 4 was what finally made the difference. I pretty much never do the seasons objectives to complete KotFE or KotET chapters as I don't like replaying them on characters that have completed the story, and whichever alt is currently working their way through it is usually not on the right step. But this time around, they started the first week of the season with KotFE chapter 1 as an objective, and the related news post stated that week five would feature chapter 5. If Bioware's intention was to encourage players to use the season to work their way through the expansions one chapter or so a week, it worked on me and I finally made the jump into KotFE, only eight years late.

I'll be doing chapter twelve this week as that's the next objective, and we'll see whether the trend continues whenever they release the list of objectives for the next few weeks.

It's just kind of weird to me that thanks to this, I've now taken three smugglers into the "Knights of" expansions - which is more than any other class - even though I think that their origin story is the least suited for the story those expansions try to tell. It's funny to me how the game just sometimes works out that way.

Showdown on Ruhnuk - Uneasy Story Thoughts

In my first impressions post about the 7.2 story update, I noted that it featured a lot of very well-done cut scenes that reminded me a bit of Knights of the Fallen Empire, and not in a bad way. Since then I've been thinking about how to best describe my thoughts about the 7.2 story more comprehensively, and it's been surprisingly difficult.

Let's start with a brief summary of the plot - this will obviously contain spoilers. Despite its length, Ruhnuk is actually easier to summarise than the previous update, because despite being longer, it's a fairly straightforward story which mainly gains its run time from cut scenes and companion chatter that isn't necessarily crucial to the plot.

Basically, as per Shae's call at the end of Digging Deeper, you travel to Ruhnuk with her, Rass Ordo and Akaavi (plus Torian if he's alive in your playthrough). The unique nature of the planet makes communications difficult, which is good for being sneaky but also makes it harder to call in support. You sneak around Heta's base of operations and run into Sa'har of all people. Your character recognises her, but a trigger-happy Shae spooks her and she runs off before you can have a meaningful conversation.

As you continue to sneak around the base, you briefly get separated, at which point Heta and crew show up and subdue you by pointing a bunch of sonic weapons at you that basically look like giant spotlights. Shae finds you again and challenges Heta to a duel, who accepts. Meanwhile you get knocked out and dragged away as a captive.

Rass shows up to rescue you just in time for you to witness the duel between Shae and Heta in a big arena. You also notice Bask Sunn on the edges, pointing one of those sonic weapons from earlier at Shae to weaken her and ensure Heta's victory. You can disrupt him or allow him to keep going.

Either way, Rass has managed to get a call for support out at last, which means that Shae's Mandalorians descend upon the scene and a big brawl between them and Heta's followers ensues. Shae's also been injured during the duel and needs rescuing. In the melee, you end up fighting Sa'har's brother Ri'kan, who it turns out has a history with Rass. In the end, Heta and her forces retreat.

In the epilogue, Shae recovers from her injuries and shares her thoughts on everything that happened - mainly she's quite annoyed that Heta got away again. You learn that Rass and Jekaiah's sister died during a mission in which she clashed with Ri'kan but his forces were beaten, and that Ri'kan blames the Ordos for the mission's failure. We also get a view of Heta's situation - she, too, is somewhat frustrated because she lost her secret base and her fleet suffered losses. Ri'kan tries to cheer her up by spoiling that Sa'har has knowledge of a powerful weapon that they could use to their advantage, somewhat to Sa'har's dismay. Heta is intrigued and immediately wants to learn more from Sa'har, with Ri'kan once again getting left behind.

So, there is a lot to love about this update. I already said that the cut scenes are great. There are some interesting minor choices to make, plus of course the major one of how to react to the discovery of Bask Sunn manipulating the duel in Heta's favour. The characters are interesting and I liked learning more about them.

The thing is... I really enjoyed my first playthrough of this story, but the second one already felt a lot less fun, and by character number three things were actually starting to drag a bit - and that gave me KotFE vibes in a bad way. Mind you, I've struggled with the replayability (or lack thereof) of newer story updates since Shadow of Revan. However, it's not always been equally bad. For example, the Jedi Under Siege story was very fun to replay because it was different for Republic and Empire, and there were a number of nice little touches that included different lines of dialogue for different origin stories.

In general, breadth is more fun to replay than length - which is not to say that you can't have both, but realistically it seems that Bioware investing in one always leads to cuts in the other area. In line with this, Showdown on Ruhnuk is a reasonably long story update, but it doesn't have a lot of breadth. It's the same for both factions and all classes, and personally I haven't run into any lines that were different based on your origin story (maybe if you're a smuggler and talking to Akaavi or something).

However, I realised that there was something else that was bothering me, and it's got to do with the non-player characters. There is some good stuff there: I quite like Rass Ordo and appreciated the addition of some flirt options with him, though you can also be very curt in your conversations if you don't like him. Similarly, the dialogue encourages you to think about your relationship with Shae, and just how far you want to go in your support of her feud against Heta. Seeing Akaavi and Torian again was also neat.

Heta, Sa'har and Ri'kan though... they are still relatively new characters all things considered, and I do find their stories and relationships interesting... but they are fairly independent of the player character. We keep seeing cut scenes of what they're up to elsewhere; we see the ways in which the relationship between Sa'har and Ri'kan is strained - and again, to some degree I'm here for that, but it's not very fun to replay because it's just like watching a mini-movie that's always the same and doesn't involve your character at all.

Again I couldn't help but be reminded of Fallen Empire and the relationships between Arcann, Vaylin and Senya. These were also kind of interesting to uncover... at first, but ultimately they largely played out without your input. Vaylin hates Senya because of her childhood, and you can't do anything about it other than tag along while Vaylin snarks and Senya cries about it. Arcann's big change of heart comes about when he sees his sister attack his mother, again something for which your character is not present for. There's all this investment in backstories that ultimately have no impact on your playthrough, and that's the kind of thing that tends to start to bother me after a while, because it feels like the whole budget is being spent on telling other characters' stories instead of yours. Sa'har and Ri'kan are far too new to annoy me in that way, but I'm a bit worried whether we'll ever get to interact with them in a meaningful manner, or whether we'll just get to watch their sibling conflict play out in "meanwhile, somewhere else" cut scenes, until one day we'll get the option to kill one or both of them and move on.

I guess it's just important to me that my character can have some sort of relationship with the NPCs that are central to the story. I didn't mind playing second fiddle to Shae on Ruhnuk, because we've fought her and worked with her, and (depending on your choices) there might be some tensions there that make you feel like your choices have meaning. It's the same reason I like Darth Malgus as a character. Sure, from a Republic point of view he's just another evil Sith, but on Empire side he gives you all those missions while levelling, then you work with him on Ilum until he betrays you. On Ossus, you work with him again, and again he turns against you and the Empire. That's some history, man, and that stuff is at the back of my mind whenever I get to interact with him. Even if the dialogue wheel doesn't give me explicit options to express all those thoughts, they're still kind of there in the background. I just can't get invested in the same way when it comes to characters we barely get to interact with.

In summary, I really enjoyed the Ruhnuk story the first time, but on replaying it I'm awkwardly reminded of some things I disliked about KotFE, and I can't help but worry whether we're heading in a similar direction again. I'm not saying it's exactly the same - we don't have the awkward chapter format to deal with, and the setup for this story has been much more organic than the weird KotFE timeskip and change of focus ever was. However, I'm definitely feeling a bit uneasy is what I'm saying.

Oh, and on a more humorous note, there's of course the part where your character gets knocked out... something else that happened a few times during KotFE but hasn't happened in a while. Please tell me I wasn't the only one who sighed when that happened and went: "Yep, here we go again"?

Anyway, that's just me - I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this. If you've replayed the Ruhnuk update on alts, how did you feel about it? And how invested are you in what happens to Sa'har and Ri'kan at this point? Let me know in the comments.

No KotFE Nostalgia for Me

I realised that with SWTOR having turned ten in December, this also means that it's already been six and a half years since the release of Knights of the Fallen Empire. Sure hasn't felt that long to me! Like it or not, the two "Knights of..." expansions made huge changes to the way SWTOR works, many of which can still be felt today, long after the narrative has pivoted away from Zakuul, and to me a lot of these still feel relatively "new" somehow. Looking back at my blog archives, I found this post from 2016, when Bioware was promoting Knights of the Eternal Throne, in which I was talking about how I thought that KotFE had been a pretty good expansion really.

Is it time to get nostalgic for good old KotFE yet? A thread I saw on reddit the other week certainly seemed to think so. Reading it did make me wonder just how many years it had actually been since I last started a character on the KotFE expansion content. I explained in this post from 2019 how KotFE and KotET are kind of mental roadblocks for me that I simultaneously don't want to deal with but also don't really want to skip, so I've got exactly one character of each class caught up with current content and everyone else lingers at some point pre-KotFE because I just can't get myself to make the jump that would require me to abandon my companions and commit to hours and hours of story content I'm not crazy about before I can get back to a happy place.

These ponderings combined with a desire to finally, for the love of god, get a Republic saboteur character into current content, actually got me to pull the trigger on launching my slightly dark side smuggler into KotFE chapter one.

I'm only a few chapters in at the time of writing this, but I can already tell that no, I definitely haven't secretly been longing to get back to this. The first few chapters are a wild ride and quite fun in their own way, I won't deny it... but knowing what's to come, the story's flaws are glaringly obvious now. Back in the day I was willing to give Bioware the benefit of the doubt while always hoping for a better outcome later. Sure, the transition from the Emperor as we met him on Ziost to Valkorion in KotFE chapter one made absolutely zero sense, but hopefully there'll be an explanation for that later, right? Unlike back in 2015, I now know that the answer to that turned out to be "not really". (We did get some closure with Echoes of Oblivion eventually, but that was several years later.)

The early KotFE chapters also set up a lot of characters as really intriguing, just to completely drop the ball on them later. Koth's introduction is super fun, but then contrasted with his care about Zakuulan civilians and his worship of Valkorion to create conflict. At the time, that could have gone in all kinds of directions, but now I know that he mostly ends up whinging a lot until the game gives you an opportunity to kill him off if you really didn't get along with him.

Likewise, Arcann and Vaylin are introduced as powerful and brash, but also with hints that their relationship with each other and with the rest of their family could be more complex than it initially appears. But nah, Arcann is just an angry man-child (until a Voss ritual magically reforms him, or not), and Vaylin is simply an angry psychopath to the end, with any attempts to evoke empathy for her ultimately not going anywhere.

However, the biggest problem is that the very first chapter, with the iconic scene of Valkorion asking you to kneel, is nothing but a sham. You're technically given the choice to reject him (I mean, you did just spend the previous expansion opposing him), but ultimately the game doesn't actually give a damn about that and railroads you into doing what he wants you to do anyway. There are a few conversation choices where you can say that you don't actually want to sit on the Eternal Throne, but they become fewer as the story progresses, because the writers need you to want the throne, so after a while that's all you're allowed to say, never mind how your character would have felt from a logical point of view.

Similarly, the story just decides that you hate Arcann and want to personally bring him down, and again, the odds are that this might make no real sense to you. In chapter one, he either helps you kill Valkorion, or he kills Valkorion himself and then just uses you as a convenient pawn to shift the blame. And yeah, he freezes you in carbonite for five years after you pass out, and that's something your character would surely be angry about, but not like "I hate you with all my soul and want to take over your Empire now" angry (unless you're a Sith I guess). Ironically the sorts of things that could have been used to justify you being really mad at him, such as the lost time, missing companions and the damage he's done to Republic and Empire, are downplayed at every point because who cares about all that old stuff, we're in "Keeping up with the Valkorions" now.

Basically, I think that in hindsight KotFE and KotET are actually quite a bit worse than I perceived them to be at the time, at least in terms of how the plot treats the player character, and in terms of hours of build-up that just end up being wasted.

"OK," you might say, "so the story was bad, but don't you think the chapter format was kinda good? New story content every month! Imagine how good SWTOR would be if we got those kinds of story updates but for Republic vs. Empire..." (someone did actually leave pretty much this as a comment on my blog once). But to that I still gotta say: "no, thanks". Sure, chapters with a more coherent story would be better than what we got, but I still don't miss the chapter format in general, for a number of reasons:

• Bioware was only able to release story content like that on a (roughly) monthly basis by pretty much stopping development on everything else about the game. I like the story, but I also want planets, flashpoints, operations etc.
• KotFE/KotET chapter length was largely created by cut scenes that don't involve or even show your character and are therefore the exact same on every playthrough, plus by making you fight hordes and hordes of boring/unavoidable enemies, which I consider unnecessary padding that I can do without. I know we're all still mad about 7.0 delivering too little story, but you know what? I've played through that story on six characters already and can honestly say that I enjoyed it every time.
• As mentioned in the previously linked post about story skipping and the issues with replaying KotFE/ET, pausing in the middle of a chapter is awkward, meaning they are not well suited as content that you can easily pick up and put down.
  
• The nature of chapters has meant that a majority of their content has to take place inside phases, with whole locations like Asylum and Vandin only existing within that story and not being available to re-visit outside the chapter, making the galaxy a smaller place. Even when Bioware tried to add a proper outdoor location for KotFE chapter fourteen in the form of Darvannis, it kinda fell flat because there wasn't really anything there other than the chapter phases (though for a while it was good for harvesting crafting materials I guess).

So yeah, I can only speak for myself but I absolutely do not miss KotFE's story, neither the content nor the format. I'm only slowly developing a desire to get more characters through it because Bioware keeps adding more content after it that I actually enjoy replaying and that I want to see from the perspective of different classes.

PSA: Struggling with Chapters?

I've got some videos on my YouTube channel of me killing a number of KotFE and KotET chapter bosses on veteran and master mode. You can find additional info about that and links to everything in this post - one of the few pieces of blog content I've put out over the years that vaguely resembles something like a guide.

I've noticed that over the last month there's been an increase in people watching and commenting on these - now, some of that might simply be more people playing the game again after the launch of the expansion, but it's not just that. A lot of players seem to be struggling even with story mode at the moment - as was highlighted by fellow blogger Roger from the Contains Moderate Peril blog:

Stuck fighting Vaylin in Visions in the Dark – KotFE Chapter 12. Firstly, why haven't I got the option of a companion? None are available according to GUI. Plus being a ranged DPS class is a real liability in this boss fight. Any suggestions? #SWTOR

— Roger Edwards (@ModeratePeril) March 14, 2022

He eventually got the fight down, but was not at all happy with the experience. I did try to assist a little on Twitter, but it's not a great format for giving detailed advice on anything. Above all I felt like I must be missing some crucial bit of information, considering that he was playing on story mode, which is often so easy that it borders on boring... heck, my last post on here was about a story fight that is so easy that it can literally complete itself without any player input.

Then again, we've also just had a new expansion and that can sometimes cause strange things to happen with tuning. A boss fight having the wrong damage and health values for its designated difficulty is certainly something we've seen happen before, but without more information it was hard to judge what exactly was going wrong.

The post I linked at the start already contains a bunch of generic advice for beating the harder fights in KotFE and KotET chapters, but I suppose the overall tone of that is aimed at players who are already at a more advanced level since they're intentionally looking to challenge themselves with the higher difficulty levels. I thought I'd use this post to present a few bullet points for more casual story players that might find themselves stuck on a fight.

• First off, make sure that you've got all your active abilities on your bar by checking the abilities tab (by default bound to P). The class changes that came with Legacy of the Sith may have caused some things to disappear from your bar. You can also change your ability tree on the combat styles tab of your character sheet to see whether there are any abilities there that you can swap around to be more useful in the particular situation that you're stuck in. If you've just been playing through the story and not much else, there may well be a number of buttons that you've never bothered to use before because you simply didn't have to. However, if you're struggling to stay alive, make sure you find all your damage reduction or self heal abilities and then remember to actually use them during the fight - all classes have at least a couple of these. This is particularly pertinent for fights like the one against Vaylin in KotFE chapter twelve, which was the one Roger struggled with.
• The fight against the Purifier Droids in KotET chapter four seems to be giving people the most trouble at the moment. First off, try using the somewhat counter-intuitive strategy demonstrated in this video here. It's counter-intuitive because according to the story you're supposed to be defending the room you're in, but in practice it's much easier to run out and fight somewhere else. If you're still struggling though, it's worth noting that Bioware has acknowledged this chapter as currently bugged (too many droids, potentially also an issue with the additional NPCs not engaging properly). There's a patch meant to be deployed next Tuesday which is supposed to fix a load of bugs, but I don't currently know whether this issue will be one of the ones addressed.
• It's worth knowing that while chapters can only be progressed solo, other people can join you to help out with a fight. To do this, invite them to a group, right-click on your portrait and there'll be an option somewhere to invite them to your instance, which should give them a teleportation prompt. This might not work in all situations (I found this out the hard way when I wanted to help a guildie kill the rancor in KotET chapter six but it kept putting me in there in Zakuulan knight disguise and therefore unable to fight), but it's a workaround for some.
• Finally, if you're just replaying the story and actually already know what happens because you previously did it on another character, keep in mind that if your level is high enough, the console on your ship should let you skip ahead to the start of KotET (if you're stuck in KotFE) or Iokath (if you're stuck in KotET). Potentially you can skip even further ahead to Ossus, but I'm assuming that you do actually want to play through as much story as possible. You might not like this option since it will resolve important story choices for you automatically based on a template, but I'm just mentioning it as another possibility if you're stuck and really want to move on.
  

To Skip or Not To Skip?

Several bloggers I'm following have been talking about Final Fantasy XIV recently, not least because it just got a new expansion. However, the game being what it is, several of those bloggers haven't actually been able to talk about the expansion yet, because they are still in the process of getting through all the prerequisite quests first, something that can only be bypassed with a cash shop purchase, and even that is a relatively recent addition from what I gather (previously there was just no way around it, period).

From this post on Time to Loot I learned that the community even has a name for the long chain of quests that players have to complete to even get access to the very first expansion: they call them "the Horrible Hundred". Bhagpuss then used this as a jumping-off point for a post of his own on when focusing on the journey instead of the destination might not be sound advice.

I've previously written about how I'm kind of glad that SWTOR is not as dogmatic when it comes to story progression, despite of the game's self-professed focus on narrative. That said, reading this whole discussion, especially Bhag's comment on Naithin's post - in which he asked whether the latter would actually be happy to skip all that content if it was a gameplay option - really made me think.

As much I've moaned in the past about KotFE and KotET in particular feeling like a bit of a drag (though actually, I already complained about Shadow of Revan and Ziost before that), I have not made use of the option to skip either so far.

I keep thinking about it, but the thing is that there are choices to be made in those expansions, and I don't like the idea of simply being saddled with one of the two default sets of options. It doesn't matter if those things never come up again afterwards; I would know! I've sometimes seen people clamour for a tool similar to Dragon Age Keep, which would allow you to lock in custom decisions even while skipping the content, but I doubt that Bioware would consider creating such a thing a good use of their time and money.

The thing is, even if we did have that option, I'm still not sure I'd want to use it. Even though replaying the exact same linear story over and over annoys me, there are moments when I find myself engaging with parts of it on a roleplayer's level, even when it's my umpteenth time through - usually because I hadn't thought about how that particular character would feel in that particular situation considering her background... which can then cause me to make somewhat different choices than I would have made if you'd simply asked me to fill out a scorecard beforehand.

On the other hand, there are the problems that make KotFE and KotET in particular - and to a lesser extent also the Iokath/traitor arc - such a nuisance to replay:

- It's not just the linearity and one-size-fits-all format of the story, but that it is so all-encompassing. Makeb and Rise of the Hutt Cartel are also linear stories, but they are independent from each other and you can do them out of order if you so wish. When you start KotFE though, the game demands that you must have finished all the "important" storylines before it, and if you haven't they will be auto-completed for you, with no option to ever go back.

- For all the complaining a certain section of the player base did about lack of content during KotFE, I've found it striking just how long each chapter is compared to the average quest line in the base game. A single planet's worth of class story is generally shorter than a chapter, with the latter clocking in at about 45-60 minutes each if you watch all the cut scenes, and still at least half of that if you were to space-bar your way through.

This is a problem in so far as chapters make it much more awkward to pause at a random point and come back later. Your overall progress will be saved, but if you exit the phase even briefly while not at a dedicated "check point", all the mobs after that will respawn. I've cleared Odessen of Zakuulan troops in "End Times" more often than I'm happy to admit, simply due to exiting the chapter at a bad time and then finding that I had to do huge chunks of combat all over again.

I'm not certain that solo flashpoints are any better either. I haven't tested it, but I would expect them to give a bit more leeway when it comes to not respawning all the trash if you leave for five minutes, but they probably won't save your overall story progress if you need to abandon it halfway through to come back another day. Either way, the end result is that both solo flashpoints and chapters make you feel like you always need to be willing to commit a larger chunk of time to playing in order to make any progress.

- Finally, all of this is made even worse by the fact that some chapters are very closely tied together and affect your gameplay outside of the main storyline. Mainly I'm thinking of how starting KotFE gets rid of all of your companions, and you don't get any new ones until chapter three, and nothing like a proper full roster until chapter nine. For that reason I never start KotFE unless I'm willing and able to burn through the first few chapters in a single session.

So for all these reasons KotFE and KotET are a bit of a nuisance in the narrative progression of one's character, and I know quite a few people who have used the option to skip this content quite liberally. For me however, the roleplaying considerations I mentioned earlier in this post weigh against that, and so far they've still won out every time.

I do think that there's a chance that my attitude might start to shift over time though, as Bioware keeps adding more and more "post-Knights" content, because the more of it there is, the more I'll feel the urge to actually get to all that content. In addition, the more the adventures of Arcann and Co. retreat into the distant past and become irrelevant, the less strongly I expect to feel about "having" to go through them for my character arc to feel complete.