The Task At Hand

This week's patch brought with it another small story update that was previously advertised as similar in scope to Hearts and Minds, and in my opinion it more than lived up to expectations. I'm really starting to like these smaller non-combat updates between the larger, more action-packed ones. It makes for excellent pacing and reminds me of how in the base game each planetary mission tends to be proceeded and wrapped up by some kind of briefing, plus you often end up spending time on your ship to chat with various companions.

6.1's story focuses first and foremost on the Alliance sorting out its new relationship with the Republic or Empire. (Consider this your spoiler warning... more details to follow!) Republic players get visited by Master Gnost-Dural and General Daeruun again, while Imperials get to meet a new character by the name of Darth Rivix. I appreciated that both visits include a little bonus mission that you can skip if you want to snub your guest(s) a bit and/or just don't feel like doing it again while replaying the thing on your umpteenth alt.

For Republic players the focus is on your visitors having arrived with a refugee ship in tow that they rescued from pirates and the Alliance offering to render some aid. I liked how on my trooper one of the people I helped said that she remembered me from Tatooine. Now that's a throwback right there!

Imperials meanwhile get to show Darth Rivix around Odessen base if they are so inclined, and Rivix sure is an interesting character. At a glance he reinforces something I've stated before, namely that all the newer Sith characters seem almost too nice compared to the many insane types we had to put up with in the base game, but Rivix's behaviour is so over the top that it's pretty much in a league of its own. From the get-go he assures you that his success is based on your success, he's not like other Sith, and if you do take the option to give him a personal tour he'll keep piping up with comments that are hard to describe as anything but sucking up to your character big time.

I enjoyed taking him at face value on my Marauder (she's a bit vain and only finds it natural that she should be admired, plus she's so convinced of her own superiority that she's not too worried about anyone trying to betray her), but I considered it equally fun to rebuff him at every turn on my agent (who has every reason to be suspicious of Sith at all times).

I saw Intisar propose on Twitter that Rivix might be a Zeltron, which would align with his looks and would provide an interesting explanation for his behaviour beyond "he's really just nice" or "he's hamming it up in order to manipulate you".

Anyway, on either faction (once again speaking purely from a loyalist point of view as I still don't have a saboteur), I found it interesting how there were differences in dialogue based on whether you had decided to fully rejoin your old faction at the end of Onslaught or opted to remain separate. If you're back in the fold there'll be comments about bringing in more troops and establishing supply lines, while independence results in much more careful inquiries along those lines.

On both factions your talks conclude with your character wondering whatever happened to Darth Malgus, followed by a brief scene in the style of "meanwhile elsewhere" that gives us as players (if not our characters) a hint on the subject matter.

On Imperial side you see Malgus waking from a proper nightmare about Empress Acina torturing him as he tries to resist her conditioning, and the medical droid he travels with telling him that this is something it can't help with. Malgus suddenly seems to have an idea though and sets course for Dantooine.

On Republic side we get a view of a peaceful farm on Dantooine where a man is repairing some droids when a woman who is revealed to be a Force user runs up to him and tells him that she can feel Malgus coming.

I have to admit that as someone who doesn't have subtitles on, the latter scene confused me initially - who was this woman and what was her connection to Malgus? But on my second run it suddenly occurred to me to check the dialogue log to see how the characters were listed there, and as it turned out they were Aryn Leneer and Zeerid Korr, two of the main characters from the Deceived novel! (I assume the third woman present must be Zeerid's daughter then.)

I read and reviewed that one back in 2012, but to be honest I've retained little of what it was about. (Skip to the next paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers for the book.) Mainly I just remember Malgus stopping a shuttle from getting away with the Force (yes, eight years before Rise of Skywalker) and rescuing his Twi'lek love interest just to kill her. And Aryn falling from a great height... for some reason... and using the Force to slow herself? Really need to add that one to my list of books to re-read.

Anyway, in game we wrap things up with a bit of conversation that is sadly exactly the same for both factions, as Kira and Scourge give an update on their mission: the transport with Satele and her students hasn't responded to the signal and its location is unknown, so they want to send out T7 and some probe droids to look for it. Your character is okay with this.

You also learn that Scourge is really having a hard time with being among the living again as he gets super angry and struggles to control his feelings. I think there is also a romantic interaction with him for Jedi knights at the end, which I haven't seen though and don't actually want to spoil for myself.

All of this doesn't take very long to play through at all, but there are enough differences between different characters that it's actually fun to go through all of your alts to see the different variations. It's great to see SWTOR going back to its roots in that regard, even if we don't have completely different class stories any more.

KotET Chapter by Chapter - Chapter 8: End Times

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

Click here to go back to Chapter 7.

The Story

You arrive on an Odessen under siege by a vengeful Vaylin, who has nothing holding her back anymore. The Gravestone was caught in dry dock when the attack happened and hasn't been able to join the fight yet. While the Eternal Fleet does its usual thing of just floating in space, with the frontline ships pew-pewing the surface a bit, you land your shuttle and, with Lana in tow, do what you can to help out your ground forces.

You commandeer a walker and get to play through another version of the walker assault on Voss from chapter one - only with the ability to heal at will as long as you're out of combat. While fighting your way through the Odessen Wilds, you make contact with various allies until you reach the Gravestone, where you meet up with either Arcann and Senya, or if they're dead, Theron. You manage to protect the ship just long enough for it to be able to take off and shoot a bunch of enemy walkers that are approaching your position. Then the Gravestone is off to help in the space battle.

At this point, you either continue with Lana and Theron, or Senya and Arcann, with Lana and Theron conveniently buggering off somewhere else. At a comm station, you contact Vaylin just as one of her underlings informs her that the battle is as good as won even though it's still going to take a while. You bait her into coming to the surface to face you (and potentially her mother and brother) personally, and she cannot resist.

After another brief stint in a walker, you receive distress calls from both Torian and Vette, both of whom claim to be pinned down. Valkorion unsubtly whispers in your ear that you can't possibly save everyone, and you are forced to choose to go support either one or the other. When you arrive at their location and try to raise the other on the comm... they are not dead, but Vaylin happened to land right on their head and has taken them prisoner. She gives you coordinates where she'll want to meet you. Your new target ends up being the Alliance base itself.

Just outside the base, where you usually bum around with other people while waiting in queues, picking up daily quests and stuff, Vaylin awaits you with some troops and her prisoner. After Valkorion shows up and they exchange some taunts, she angrily hurls her prisoner to the floor... but just as you kneel down to help them, Vaylin uses the Force to twist their neck.

With that final gauntlet thrown down, it's time for the big showdown, in which Vaylin's barely contained power cracks the very walls of the base, but with the help of your allies you finally defeat her. Her forces immediately break and retreat upon her death and it seems that the fight is finally over.

When you talk to your closest allies, they express grief about the death of either Torian or Vette, and Arcann or Lana comment that they could feel Vaylin's power flowing into you, though unlike her father she doesn't seem to have possessed the strength of spirit to live on in your head. Just then, you receive distress calls from the Sith Empire and Zakuul, and the Republic is under attack as well. The Eternal Fleet has gone rogue and is bombing planets everywhere into oblivion. Valkorion opines that the only way to stop it is to take control over it via the Eternal Throne. So you ask for the Gravestone to be readied as you have to pay Zakuul one more visit.

My Thoughts

In a nutshell, End Times is what Battle of Odessen should have been: an actual planetary battle, with armies clashing, people dying, and a big showdown at the end. (In fact, I accidentally keep referring to this chapter as "Battle of Odessen" in my head... KotET chapter 16 is more of a "Showdown with Arcann".) It's not perfect, but I certainly found myself sufficiently engrossed by the events to be excited about what was going to happen next and not nitpick any details until later.

The walker section from chapter one makes a return and feels less annoying due to the ability to heal up wherever you want, but at the same time the fact that there's two vehicle segments along the road makes it feel like the mechanic is overstaying its welcome a little bit. On replaying it, I found that it didn't actually feel as long as it did on my first playthrough, but the problem is that it's way too easy to run into some kind of nuisance. For example you cannot voluntarily exit the walker, and for some reason it walks quite slowly and has issues with obstacles that your character could ordinarily leap over with ease. During my first playthrough of this chapter, I realised fairly late that I had missed a companion for the bonus mission near the start... but since I was in a walker bit at the time, I had to plod back to the start really slowly, making the whole thing take forever. On this playthrough, which was on veteran mode, I died a couple of times and it respawned me way back at the start every time, enforcing a really annoying run back. I've also heard that the walker doesn't play nice if you want to bring a friend along to the chapter - since they can't get into the walker with you, they basically get swarmed and killed by the mobs every time.

The choice between Torian or Vette is simultaneously great and a bit cheap. It's contrived because you have several highly competent characters with you who can single-handedly turn the tide of many a battle, but for some reason you can't freaking split up? But it's also great because it really forces you to think and makes for a great talking point with other players. The emotional punch hits all the harder because while Valkorion pretty much warns you that the one you don't choose to help will die, nothing happens right away, allowing you to keep hoping that things will be alright somehow until Vaylin delivers the killing blow at the very last moment. Ouch.

The fact that you run most of the chapter either with Arcann and Senya or Lana and Theron makes for some interesting variety too. Personally I find facing off against Vaylin with her mother and brother by my side the much more satisfying option, but that may just be me. Considering the emphasis the Betrayed trailer put on the relationship between Senya and Vaylin (plus everything we saw of the two of them interacting in KotFE), the final confrontation between them feels kind of subdued, but that's what you get when Senya could theoretically already be dead by that point and the moment has to be more about you than about any of your companions.

Onwards to Chapter 9!

Thoughts on Star Fortresses

While I've given the "new" endgame introduced in KotFE a thumbs up in principle, I have to admit that I haven't felt particularly engaged by it on a personal level. It seems that people are mostly excited about doing heroics if they didn't really do them before, but I've been doing them since the game came out. I got the "complete all heroics" achievement the moment they introduced achievements (because I'd done them all before), and I've done them even more times since then. But just grinding them at max level? Meh.

Likewise, I don't really care that much about companion power. I never really had any issues with my companions even before 4.0. I like unlocking new ones to see their stories, but once the story ends, so does my interest. I think the highest influence rank I have on any character is 12, and that's only because some companions start at 10.

The one thing that has intrigued me a bit are the Star Fortresses. It's like a bonus storyline that's gated behind content that is challenging to solo. My pet tank and I burnt through it quickly during the first week, and he became obsessed with chain-running them until he had all the achievements. Once that was done, he seemed to lose interest too.

The one thing that bugs me about Star Fortresses is that I'm not sure what they are supposed to be, what their role is supposed to be in the grand scheme of things. I almost felt a little offended when I first found that the tougher missions had both "Heroic 2+" and "Flashpoint" in the name. What are you, a heroic or a flashpoint? You can't be both at once; that goes against everything I believe!

Once inside, Star Fortresses kind of come across as a poor man's Kuat Drive Yards, which is to say they are mostly bland-looking space stations that try to be interesting by not being exactly the same every time. But where Kuat at least mixes it up with different scenarios, the Star Fortresses just do things like lock some doors and open others, put the bonus bosses (called paladins) in different rooms and rotate through a couple of different bonus missions. It can be kind of fun to stick your nose into every available nook and cranny to see where things are hiding this time, but it's not that exciting.

Only the final encounter with the exarch on heroic mode is genuinely interesting in my opinion, set in front of the backdrop of the glowing sun reactor, and with a gradually increasing challenge level as you fight your way through the room, even if you're in a group.

On the plus side, unlike Kuat the Star Fortresses give some pretty good loot. There are a lot of decoration drops in there, as well as miscellaneous pieces of gear that you could sell for decent amounts of money, at least early on.

One thing I found amusing is that if you die anywhere but in the final exarch encounter, instead of reviving on the spot, you wake up in prison! This is a fun little play on the way a convenient probe usually just revives you on the spot without the baddies interfering in any way, which is one of those things that simply requires suspension of disbelief. Once imprisoned in the Fortress, you have to go through a short little routine of tricking and defeating the guards to free yourself.

Another aspect that's interesting are the (sometimes hidden) achievements. For example there's one to kill an exarch with their own fiery beam of death, which my pet tank made a point of getting, so I got it as well simply by tagging along. There is one for doing the heroic version in a group and with every possible buff inside the instance unlocked, which I also did with my pet tank. There is one to spy a droid belonging to the Shroud outside the station, which seems to have an annoying RNG component to it. At first I thought I was looking in the wrong place because I ran Fortress after Fortress without ever seeing it, but once it appeared it was plain as day. I never missed it, it just didn't seem to spawn in all those earlier runs.

Finally there is "One For All", which awards a title and requires you to solo the heroic mode with no buffs. I got it on my "can't play her for toffee" Marauder with a rank five companion, but it did take a while. I died a lot and just kept throwing myself at things until I eventually managed to grind them down. At one point I was sufficiently frustrated that I was willing to give up and activate the main buff after all, except that there didn't seem to be a way to go back to that part of the Fortress. If my only options were to abandon the whole thing or to press on, I decided to go for the latter after all.

Basically everything from the moment you encounter the exarch is pure pain. Personally I thought that the first room with the two gold knights was actually the worst. They just hit so hard! I kept dying before I could even get one of them down. I think I eventually succeeded with the help of a lot of cooldown chaining.

The same was true of the subsequent rooms, where you have to deal with an ever growing amount of adds before you can force the exarch to move on. Again, I died a couple of times but just kept giving it another try every time my heroic moment was up again. (As an aside, that's when I noticed that they replaced Legacy Force Storm with Legacy Chain Lightning... how sad!)

The exarch also killed me a couple of times, but again I eventually managed to get there by chaining all my cooldowns. Really, that seems to be the key to this achievement: perseverance and remembering all your buttons.

Currently I'm going back to them on my Marauder every so often to unlock all the companions related to the storyline, but it just feels kind of tedious on my own. Plus it's just not as fun to do on multiple characters (in my opinion). Are there people who love the new Star Fortresses?

For the Alliance! A Different Endgame

One of the bigger surprises of Knights of the Fallen Empire has been the game's alliance system. The devs had made some vague references to it before launch, but nobody really knew how it was going to work. Now we do, and while I've only invested a limited amount of time into it myself, I still think that it's a pretty neat little system, mainly for four reasons:

1) It ties neatly into the main storyline.
2) A lot of it can be done solo or with one other person.
3) It taps into players' urge to collect things and make their characters more powerful.
4) It's what I consider a "good" sort of grind.

Before KotFE's launch, I had kind of wondered how Bioware was going to handle the fact that we were initially only going to get access to nine chapters of a story that's supposed to be a total of sixteen chapters long. I had mental images of the game ending on a cliffhanger, leaving you with nothing but a "to be continued" screen. But no, the way they've handled it is actually pretty clever. The entirety of chapter nine is basically about introducing you to the idea that you need to build an alliance, and continuing to work on it after the chapter has officially ended feels perfectly natural. This should make the transition from the solo story to staying in the game for repeatable content and a persistent world a lot more palatable and might avoid some of the issues people had at launch, where they played through their class story with gusto but then quickly drifted away because they weren't interested in larger group content and it felt like their personal story had ended.

Following on from this, it makes sense that the alliance endgame is much more accessible to the solo player than more "traditional" endgame activities such as raiding. Yes, there are Star Fortresses to blow up and heroic missions to run, but all of these can be soloed, it's just easier and often more rewarding with an extra person in tow. I suspect that Bioware's hope here is that this content will serve as a stepping stone for mostly solo players to get them to start interacting with other people and maybe forge some social ties in the process, without throwing them in at the deep end.

At its core, the alliance system is also really simple. I've been trying to think about how to sum it up for this post, and really, what it comes down to is that you're collecting companions and increasing their power over time. They all have little stories associated with them, which isn't quite as good as a new chapter for the major storyline, but it's still a charming little piece of extra content, so why wouldn't you do it? If you want, you can stop after merely acquiring your new companions... but why not spend some time making your new friends and allies a little more powerful as well, meaning that they'll kick that much more butt whenever they are out questing with you?

This is where the "grind" comes in, though unlike a lot of people I'm not using that word in a negative way here. A lot of the time, when people talk about grind in an MMO, what they really mean is that there is some sort of repeatable content that is designed for you to... repeat it (duh). And that is not inherently a bad thing! The only times when grind becomes problematic is when it simply serves as a gating mechanic to a greater reward, so that people do it purely for the reward without actually enjoying the activity itself.

The reason I think that the alliance system is a good grind is that it isn't tied to any huge rewards, but at the same time there are so many ways to work on it that it would be hard to find a reason to not work on it at all. There are companion missions that push you towards trying out different activities, such as PvP or hunting down world bosses, but more importantly, you can buy both alliance resource boxes and companion gifts to progress your alliance for common data crystals from a vendor, and you can get those crystals from pretty much any PvE content these days. It's all tied together pretty nicely.

Is everything perfect then? Of course not, there is always something to criticise! First off, the "classic conversation interface" used for alliance missions comes as a bit of a shock to the system, whether you ultimately end up liking it or not. Bioware has officially pegged it as a nostalgic throwback to Knights of the Old Republic and as a way of giving people more than three conversation options, but it seems to primarily be a cost-cutting measure, even if Bioware won't admit that. They've always said that voice acting doesn't take up as much of the game's budget as people think and I believe that, but it's still obvious that it's got to be a money-saver to only pay for one voice-over per conversation (the NPC you're talking to) because the player character is suddenly silent (which means that you don't have to pay the sixteen voice actors that do the male and female versions of the player characters of all eight classes). Hell, if you make the NPC an alien that speaks Huttese or some other alien language, you can use a stock "alien gibberish" recording and don't need to record anything new at all!

I can't blame people for being cynical about this move, but cost-cutting and simplification measures like these were already a part Shadow of Revan, what with the side missions that didn't have true conversations, just a quick one-liner that played when you clicked on the NPC. And if I had to choose between that and the alliance conversation system, I'd take the latter any day - at least it's still interactive! It's also something that is only being applied to these specific side missions and the main storyline will continue to maintain its usual production quality. Honestly, once I got over the "shock" of how different it looked, I quickly got used to it.

The other concern is that in its effort to be accessible and optional, the alliance system may not prove "sticky" enough to keep players around that aren't also into some other part of the game, though obviously only time will tell. At the same time, the grindiness involved in actually collecting and levelling all the available companions could be considered alt-unfriendly (even if it's not a requirement for anything) and might put people off in a different way.

Lastly, I personally can't help but wonder what will happen to the whole system once new story content is released. As I said, the end of chapter nine ties pretty neatly into getting the player to work on the alliance system. But what happens once chapter ten comes out? I don't expect that our alliance will become irrelevant until closer to the actual end of the storyline, but is the progression from the main story to this different kind of endgame still going to feel natural as time goes on? Or will people have to backtrack once more chapters have come out? Or skip it altogether? I do worry a little that Bioware (like many other MMO developers, sadly) isn't keeping enough of an eye on how to make sure that their content remains viable for a long time and doesn't become pointless the moment the next expansion shifts the focus to something else again.