Looking Good

When Crisis on Umbara came out, I thought that it was set in an interesting environment, what with the moving train and those weird tentacle things coming out of the ground. Traitor Among the Chiss raised the bar by taking us to the gorgeous Chiss world of Copero. I didn't think it could get any better than that, but the Nathema Conspiracy proved me wrong. That was quite a surprise too, considering Nathema's dreariness in KotET chapter seven.

The Force made it pretty again though. I swear most of my time during my first playthrough of the flashpoint was taken up by just looking around and taking screenshots. Here are a few of them:

I remember recently in my comment section Soots commented about how none of the new flashpoints are as fun and attractive as the classic ones, and another commenter replied - quite rightly so - that in a comparison of the visuals between False Emperor and Traitor Among The Chiss, the latter would come out as a clear winner. As much as it's fun to reminisce about the good old days sometimes, in terms of looks SWTOR's environments have only become prettier.

I think this will only add to people's already existing longing for another "proper" open-world planet to be added to the game again soon. The fleet is fine as a hub but sometimes you just want to treat your eyes to something nicer. And Iokath didn't really fit the bill for this due to its mechanical design.

Speaking of appearances, the patch also brought with it a new hairstyle. Please tell me I wasn't the only one who paused after seeing it for the first time and went to the Cartel Market to check if a new hair bundle had been released?! Bioware surprised everyone in a positive way however by simply adding the new hairstyle to the existing selection for free. It's a pretty good one as well, a nice variant of the classic short ponytail. I just fear that I might get sick of seeing it pretty quickly, what with seemingly everyone on my Twitter timeline rolling up new alts with the exact same hairstyle now!

KotET Chapter 7 Master Mode

This chapter was an interesting one to play through on master mode. There is very little trash on Nathema (just a couple of small pulls inside the sanitarium), so all the challenge comes from defeating the four (mini) boss fights the chapter features. None of them are easy, though nothing's quite as bad as chapter two.

The first challenge comes from the pair of Horizon Guards you have to pass on the way to the facility, just after crossing a bridge. On my Scoundrel I actually just stealthed past them, but that felt a little cheeky, so I gave the chapter another run-through on my Sorcerer afterwards, so I would have something to say about the encounter. I remember back on veteran mode I was a bit confused about why I ended up fighting more than two guards in the end and blamed this on them bugging out after being knocked off the bridge, but this time around I could see that after the first two die (regardless of how), another pair actually spawns in and puts you in combat right away, because apparently two gold mobs immune to crowd control at once weren't bad enough!

Still, with a knockback even that remained relatively easy... I only killed one of the guards the old-fashioned way, the other three all died to being knocked off the bridge/nearby cliff. I think that either stealth or a knockback are the way to go with these. I have no idea how you would tackle this fight as a Vanguard or Powertech though.



The Horizon Captain at the door is undoubtedly the hardest boss of the chapter, but can once again be dispatched easily if you have a knockback by simply running him towards the side of the cliff and punting him to his death. On my Scoundrel I had to kill him "the hard way", but that too was eventually doable.

His most dangerous ability is Mass Affliction, which hurts like hell and needs to be interrupted/cleansed every time. Overload and Thundering Blast can easily be dodged, and simply try not to stand on top of your companion whenever you get Force Imbalance on you. What makes the fight really tough in my opinion is that on top of all this, the Captain's basic melee attacks hit really hard. When you find your health dropping too low, you'll just have to resort to kiting him for a bit to give your companion time to heal you back up. Fortunately he's not a particularly fast runner.



Up next is a duo of Twisted Experiments. I found that if you wipe to these by the way, you'll respawn behind a locked door - you'll have to exit the area and then go back in to find it opened again. Fortunately here one of them can be crowd-controlled while you kill the other one off, and both of them are susceptible to stuns as well. Use what interrupts you have as well as those stuns to burn through their health quickly, and then kite the rest of the way. Once again, their basic melee attacks just hit too hard to withstand them without cooldowns (plus if you can't interrupt, they'll spawn puddles of corrosive goo on the floor that you need to move out of).



The Corrupted Vault Guardian is probably the most interesting fight of the chapter. On a basic level, he keeps covering the floor of the room in "Morass", which never goes away so if you're too slow or just bad at manoeuvring him, you can end up with bad stuff everywhere and nowhere left to go. Obviously interrupting that cast to buy yourself more time is useful, but you can only get it every so often.

After he's channeled Unleashed Rage, it's best to just kite him around for a bit, as he'll hit three times as hard and reflects damage. Shortly afterwards he tends to "resist the void", which is a brief "burn phase" when you should do as much damage as possible. Towards the end he also starts to do an AoE stun every so often which throws everything off kilter a bit, but you've just got to get through that somehow. Don't be afraid of using your stun breaker!

Throughout all of this, companion micro-management is key, to prevent Lana from running into the puddles of bad or trying to attack the boss while he's enraged.



For what it's worth, I actually found this chapter strangely enjoyable to replay on master mode. It's probably just a tad too long to be an efficient CXP farm, but it feels relatively short and while the fights are hard, they reward tactical play and aren't hampered by too much randomness.

The Road Ahead to April

Keith treated us to another road map this week, though for some reason it wasn't posted as a feature on the main website but instead relegated to a forum post. It was also much shorter than either of his previous road maps, which gave the doom-and-gloomers yet more ammunition ("No information on what's happening after April? Shutdown imminent!") and seems to have left quite a few people disappointed. Me? I'll take what I can get.

I'm not going to talk about every single point mentioned in the forum post in detail, but four main subjects were covered:

Operations

Master mode Gods from the Machine has been officially cancelled! As a raider, I guess I should be saddened by this, but firstly I can't even beat veteran mode anyway, and secondly I've been predicting this pretty much since September, so I can't help but feel somewhat vindicated.

There was some confusion as Keith started off by stating that Izax (the last boss) would come in master mode only, which of course made everyone wonder how that was going to work with the rest of the operation. Then it was clarified that the fight was actually going to be veteran mode as usual, just really hard. You mean... like most of the operation? I just suggested the other day that they might as well rename the whole thing to master mode, you know...

There was also some talk about special rewards for people who'd be able to beat Izax within the patch cycle, which will definitely not include me. I don't mind Keith trying to court top tier raiders a bit; I just wish it hadn't come at the expense of mid-tier guilds like mine.

Flashpoints

The third flashpoint that's part of the current storyline will come out in April, which means that this arc will finally wrap up after eight months. That's somewhat on the slow side, especially considering that the last time we had a story arc being told entirely through flashpoints (Forged Alliances), we got four of them in only half the time (four months).

Any rumours about the line that we would be returning to a place we hadn't expected to return to referring to Oricon were put to rest as it's been confirmed that this installment will be taking place on Nathema. I have to admit I was a little disappointed by that as I like Oricon more, and it would have felt like more of a big return to go back there since it's been a really long time since its release, while we had to go to Nathema only a year ago. Still, let more speculation about just why we're going back there abound!

Conquest Revamp

The long-predicted conquest revamp is apparently coming up in March, but it sounds less exciting than I had hoped - no mention of structural changes to make smaller guilds more competitive, just talk of more objectives, a new interface and new rewards. I mean, those are still good things and might help to reinvigorate my interest in conquest; I was just hoping for more.

One of the new rewards will be an item called the Commander's Compendium that will allow you to instantly boost a companion to influence level 50. The nice thing about reading this was that this item had recently been datamined and looked like it was meant to just go on the Cartel Market, but apparently that's not the plan.

I also have to admit that this is something I could actually see myself using. Most of my companions are actually at very low influence levels because it's a stat that doesn't really matter to me, but on the rare occasion when it does matter (such as in a master mode story chapter), it would be nice to be able to do something about it without having to click a zillion companion gifts. The downside of course is that this compendium is only a workaround for the tedium of the influence system instead of an actual solution to its issues. There still don't seem to be any plans to allow influence gains from a larger variety of sources (such as combat) or to add the ability to give a whole stack of companion gifts at once.

Companions

Loads of companion returns planned in the near future! The list for the next two months includes Akaavi, Ashara, Lt. Iresso, Mako and Vector! I was actually surprised by how excited I was to read this. I still haven't done the missions to get Andronikos, Corso and Risha back, but I'm working my way towards them and that's why I'm excited about these additions too. I've never been as enamoured with any of my companions as some people, but I did notice a few months after KotFE's release that having lost all my class companions did bother me.

More importantly though, I've felt that there's been little incentive to replay any of the more recent content on alts - but what better incentive is there than unique, class-specific content waiting at the end? I don't care if it's not long or particularly amazing - this is the closest we've come to giving the classes some definition since Shadow of Revan's class-specific vignettes on Rishi (which also motivated me to drag one of every single base class through that story).

As an interesting twist, Akaavi and Mako are slated to return together, striking an interesting compromise between limiting returning companions to their original class and making them available to everyone, as smugglers will now be able to recruit Mako and bounty hunters Akaavi. By the way, "Where's Mako? Torian knows (a little)" became the second most-watched video on my YouTube channel over time - after the road map announcement, I went and left a comment on my own video to point out Mako's imminent return. (You know that if I hadn't done it, someone else would have.)

There will also be content for one of our newer companions in the form of an Arcann romance. I've said in the past that he's come a very long way since KotFE, from a character I couldn't see anyone loving to a very changed man. I'm not usually big on companion romances in this game, but I've somewhat come around to the idea here and could see my Jedi knight going for it depending on how it plays out.

I'm also curious how they'll handle a romance coming out as a "package", as all previous romances were more about unlocking romantic interactions as an aside to the main storyline over time. Chaining three different cut scenes together during which you go from casually flirting straight to the black screen of carnal knowledge over the course of five minutes might feel a bit strange (to me, anyway. I know for others BSOCK is what it's all about.)

Other than these four main topics, there was mention of more subscriber rewards coming soon, as well as more "upcoming group content", which once again has people speculating whether this means more flashpoints, something entirely different, or whether Bioware is actually working on getting a whole new operation ready for release in one go after all the difficulties with Gods from the Machine.

Another thing that surprised me was this line: "As we look back to 2017 and now beyond the conclusion of the traitor storyline, we are planning to continue delivering content in the same manner throughout 2018." Keith then goes on to say that he's had feedback indicating that people want a more traditional expansion but that this wasn't the current plan. I had been utterly sure that they were already working on a "proper" expansion! I guess this doesn't mean that they won't decide to parcel up some of the new content and decide to release it as an expansion anyway, but at this rate we're unlikely to see anything like it any time soon.

KotET Chapter by Chapter - Chapter 7: Into The Void

Time for another detailed and spoiler-laden discussion of a Knights of the Eternal Throne chapter. We're up to chapter seven! Though if you missed it...

Click here to go back to Chapter 6.

The Story

We start the chapter with a view of Valkorion on his throne, flanked by his two sons. Adult Vaylin appears and tells him that he should have left her on Nathema. He responds that Zakuul is where she belongs and hands her a lightsaber. There is a brief moment where it seems like she might strike at her father in anger, but then she kneels to him instead.

Your character wakes, revealing that this was something you dreamt. Valkorion's ghost comments that this is a sign of your increasing connection, since what you saw was one of his memories. You ask about Nathema and he explains that it's a "blighted, forgotten world where the Force has been corrupted" (if you read the Revan novel, you know all about that already) and that he sent Vaylin to be taught and conditioned there. He also suggests that the timing of this dream is a warning that Vaylin is seeking to return to Nathema to break her conditioning.

When you walk in on Theron and Lana speculating where Vaylin's disappeared to shortly afterwards, you suggest Nathema as an option. Theron locates it and realises that Vaylin had communications with someone there during the party. If Arcann is one of your followers now, he expresses fear of returning there and that being exposed to its taint might undo everything he's achieved since Voss, which is why he wants to stay behind.

Either way, you travel to Nathema by shuttle, only accompanied by Lana and Theron. Lana immediately starts having headaches upon arrival, as the Force is kind of "hollow" on the planet, and it feels like the void wants to devour her. Valkorion's ghost appears to flicker in and out of existence as well. We see Vaylin landing at a remote facility, speaking to an Anomid scientist and insisting on entering alone, without her guards. You land nearby to retrace her steps with Lana while Theron stays with the shuttle.

Meanwhile, the player sees Vaylin walk through a sort of indoor garden where she's assaulted by a number of monstrous beasts that bear some resemblance to Acklays. She is momentarily frightened when she realises that she can't use her Force powers here to swat them aside, but then she simply pulls out her lightsaber to cut them down manually. The Anomid scientist we saw her talking to in chapter six, Jarak, expresses distaste for her lack of control and the killing of his "pets". However, he also says that he made a breakthrough in terms of breaking Vaylin's conditioning and offers to show her to the main lab.

You and Lana fight your way into the "sanitarium" in her wake and find traces of what Vaylin must have gone through in her childhood, from her literal cell to holojournals detailing the gruelling treatments she underwent at the hands of Jarak, who was given free reign to do whatever he wanted to her short of getting her killed.

The scene returns to Jarak and Vaylin, where the scientist confesses that none of his lab rats survived his new treatment so far, but he is sure that Vaylin will be fine due to her strength. We see her getting engulfed by green lights and scream in pain as she unleashes a destructive wave of power. Even you and Lana can feel it and push ahead to stop the process. You run straight into Jarak, who's trying to flee the scene. He worries that Vaylin's power will destroy the facility and that there isn't enough time to escape. He offers to lead you to a safe place however, provided that you help protect him on the way.

Your safe haven turns out to be a vault that is shielded against Force powers due to Valkorion having used it to store particularly powerful and dangerous artifacts. Soon after you enter the vault, we see Vaylin freeing herself from the painful grip she in in. If Senya is still alive, she will wake from her coma during the height of Vaylin's pain, which makes for a nice throwback to the Betrayed trailer.

The burst of power has overloaded the circuits that open the vault door, forcing you to look for a way to restore backup power. A mysterious red holocron catches your eye, and when you touch it, it reveals the spirit of a Pureblood Sith Lord, who seems to have expected the Emperor - to whom he refers as "Tenebrae" - to come and torment him again. He reveals himself as Lord Dramath, the Emperor's father and former ruler of the planet - until his son murdered him and turned the planet into a wasteland by performing a dark ritual, similar to what he did on Ziost.

Dramath begs you to release him from imprisonment and end his existence, while promising that his holocron will serve you as a tool to destroy Valkorion. You can grant his wish or keep him trapped inside the holocron to make use of him later.

Your rummaging around has awoken some monstrous vault guardians that kill Jarak (if you haven't already offed him yourself). Once you defeat them, you can escape the vault. Vaylin is shown to already be back on her flagship, and she enjoys demonstrating her newly unfettered powers by killing most of her own guards without even breaking a sweat. She also channels her hatred into destroying the sanitarium, forcing you to make a run for it to make it out alive, but Theron manages to pick you up before things fall apart. Once off Nathema, Valkorion reappears and confirms that Vaylin has broken her bonds and is now more dangerous than ever. He also seems worried that you might have found something dangerous in the vault.

The chapter ends with Bey'wan Aygo calling you on the holo: You are needed on Odessen urgently as it's under attack.

My Thoughts

I thought that "Into The Void" was another interesting chapter. Nathema is compared to Ziost, and similar to that planet there is less of a focus on combat and more on letting the sheer deadness of the environment weigh you down. While there are more enemies to fight on Nathema than on Ziost, there are still fewer of them than in most chapters, and Bioware definitely lets the heaviness of the place sink in.

However, the focus is less on Nathema's own dark past and more on everything Vaylin went through. Even if you never saw the trailer for KotET, this is a turning point where you get to feel some sympathy for Vaylin upon seeing her prison and understanding what she must have gone through. While the story does point this out, the environment invites you to take a closer look and draw your own conclusions. For example I found it quite heart-breaking to find the "cell" that Vaylin clearly was confined to, containing nothing but a small cot, a desk and a chair. On the desk you can also spot what looks like the little toy she crafted in the trailer... though that would be a continuity error as the trailer also shows it lying in a puddle on Ord Mantell later... but who knows, she might well have made another one. There is a corner with beat up skytrooper dummies that are arranged in a similar fashion as the "knight pinata" she attacked in the trailer - was this the one place where she was allowed to try and exercise her powers sometimes?

You also wonder about the lives of the other people inhabiting the facility - while searching for a key card, you rifle through some books, and on flipping one of them open, I noticed that a postcard from Alderaan had been used as a bookmark - an odd splash of colour in an otherwise very grey environment. Personally I also couldn't help but wonder why the place was such a mess though, with rubbish and random papers on the floor everywhere. There were people living there after all, did they never bother to do even the smallest amount of tidying?

After seeing all of that, you can't help but feel for Vaylin a little when she's trapped in Jarak's machine and in pain. After she breaks free, there is some great work with facial expressions done in the cut scenes, as she slowly goes from a slightly confused "I'm alive?" sort of expression to a sardonic victory grin.

Meanwhile, your character is in a bit of an odd place because you keep chasing Vaylin around but don't really achieve anything on that front. The only interesting choice you get to make is whether to free or keep Lord Dramath, and the significance of that doesn't really become apparent until a bit later.

That said, just seeing Nathema realised in game and talking to Dramath feels great if you've read the Revan novel. So while this chapter is heavy on exposition and explaining Vaylin's (and to some extent Valkorion's) backstory, with a limited amount of action for your character, I've enjoyed it every time because it's just so atmospheric, achieving a very different feel from any other chapters of KotFE or KotET.

Onwards to Chapter 8!