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.

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.)

Dread Master Brontes Wins Again

Progression raiding in SWTOR is a weird thing these days, and not just because a lot of outsiders are likely to go "SWTOR has raids?!" when you bring up the subject.

In a game like WoW, new raid tiers come out all the time, and every time a new one is added, the old one becomes obsolete, which fuels a frantic race to get through the new content before it reaches the end of its shelf life.

In SWTOR, there's only a very small minority interested in seeing who'll be the first to get the kill of a new operations boss on a higher difficulty - plus as it stands, we've only had a single new operation in the last five years anyway, so it's not exactly as if there's been a lot to get excited about.

For most players, what matters is that ever since 4.0 Bioware has continually scaled all operations content upwards so that Eternity Vault from back in 2011 is still as relevant as endgame in 2019 as the more recently released Gods from the Machine.

This means that if you're not good enough to actually clear all the operations on all difficulties, you can basically keep progressing on them forever... which is exactly what my guild has been doing. The 5.x cycle has been particularly good for us because the boss's values remained stable for so long and we got access to some pretty overpowered gear pretty quickly. I got to tell quite a few tales of successful boss killing on this blog in the past year.

We still haven't killed everything though, and that's not even counting the most recent release, master mode Gods from the Machine. It's slightly awkward to think about, because if we're being honest with ourselves, it basically means that we're not very good. Some of these fights have been out for more than five years and we still haven't killed them? Come on!

A more charitable interpretation would be that we are very persistent and have taken our time getting better at the game. Most of us struggled with simple hard modes when they first came out, to the point that nightmare difficulty felt like something we'd be unlikely to ever reach in the future - yet here we are.

One boss I was really hoping to get down before 6.0 resets everything again was Dread Master Brontes on master mode, mostly because I have personal beef with her at this point. I vividly recall wiping to her in the run-up to 4.0, back when we were actually five levels higher than the boss and still found the fight too hard. I don't remember all the details, but I do recall thinking that I was sure that we were going to get her down before 4.0 hit because to me it felt like we were close. That didn't happen though.

August 2015

That was over four years ago now, and I really wanted to get her down this time. While we have to fight her at level now, we all got a lot better at the game in the meantime. And yet... this past Sunday was our last night attempting her as people voted to have a few weeks break before the expansion, something I can't exactly blame them for. I'm also not sure we would have been able to get her down even if we had tried for another three weeks, because unlike my fuzzy memories from 2015, it hasn't really felt to me like we've come even close to killing her this time around.

We are pretty good at making it to the last phase by now, but as soon as we're there it feels like everything falls apart in seconds, and the problem is that unlike with Revan for example, it's kind of hard to tell what exactly happened. There isn't a single mechanic that will kill you instantly, but there are a lot of things that can do a lot of damage, so it can be hard to tell what exactly killed any individual at a certain point, whether it was just too much unavoidable damage adding up and not enough healing, or whether someone or even multiple someones made a mistake that caused just too much extra damage at the wrong moment.

September 2019

There was a time when this sort of thing would have upset me a lot more than it does now (and I have the awkwardly ranty blog posts to prove it), but fortunately I have too many other things going on these days to get too hung up on a single boss kill. Plus we'll always get to try again after the expansion's release I guess.

From the way things look right now, there's even a chance that my prediction that things would become harder again in 6.0 might actually turn out to be wrong! I based this on the way things played out during the transition from 4.0 to 5.0, but as we know from the PTS now, Bioware is actually planning to scale us down to the old operations going forward, making Brontes (and us when we go to fight her) level 55 again instead of 75.

If scaling was perfect that probably wouldn't make much of a difference, but as it stands, downscaled high-level characters in SWTOR tend to be a bit on the overpowered side, and early PTS reports indicated that this effect applied in full force in the newly downscaled operations. So for all we know we might be able to waltz in there in 6.0 and one-shot her. It's unlikely, but... I'm happy to wait and see how things pan out.

Looking Back At Past Expansion Announcements

As someone who likes to look back as much as forward (if not more so), all the recent excitement about the Onslaught expansion made me try to recall how I felt whenever new SWTOR expansions had just been announced in the past. I don't think I was that excited? That's one of the great things about having a blog though: I actually have a written record of those times that I can check.

As it turns out, I remembered correctly that I wasn't as excited about previous expansions... but it's almost comical how un-excited I was about some of them when they were first announced.

Rise of the Hutt Cartel's announcement was received with a lackadaisical "Expansion Time, Then?" as I was actually kind of grumpy about having to pay for content that Bioware had advertised as free to all subscribers at E3 only a few months earlier. I wasn't convinced that raising the level cap after only a little more than a year was a good thing, and getting "only" one new planet didn't seem like much of an expansion to me. (How spoiled I was!) To top things off, this was also around the time when a memory leak caused my game to crash several times a night. I wasn't really having the best of times.

Galactic Starfighter's announcement was similarly unexciting to me. Once again I used "expansion" only in quotation marks and declared that I felt decidedly "meh" about the concept of space combat, despite of seemingly everyone else being super excited about it. Admittedly it turned out that my attitude was actually pretty in line with that of the majority of the player base on this one, but still...

Galactic Strongholds had been rumoured for a while when it was finally announced officially. I was kind of ambivalent because I was never really into housing but it seemed at least vaguely interesting. In hindsight it's weird to see myself talk about how much I used to enjoy hanging out on the fleet, because ever since the introduction of strongholds that has changed. I blame the legacy cargo hold... if I could access that from the fleet too, I would probably prefer to hang out there still, but I guess limiting them to strongholds was Bioware's incentive to make people use their new houses (and it worked).

It's also funny to see how I guessed some things correctly, such as that the system would be more about arranging furniture than about building things from the ground up, or that a lot of the best stuff would come from the Cartel Market. On the other hand it's interesting to see some of the things I was theorising about at the time that ended up being completely off-base, such as that we might be getting a new furniture-making crew skill, or that companions might come visit us in our strongholds and wander around instead of being static decorations.

The Shadow of Revan announcement mostly had me whinging about its trailer being lacklustre, Lana and Theron featuring too prominently in the loading screen art (boy, did I have no idea what was to come), not liking the experience boost that was being given out as a pre-order "perk" and feeling wary of  the upcoming changes to the talent system. But hey, at least I acknowledged with this one that two new planets, two new operations and two new flashpoints was a good chunk of new content.

Fallen Empire was shrouded in a lot of mystery and hype due to its fancy trailer and departure from what had come before. I was trying to keep things grounded in my initial analysis, and was actually spot-on with almost everything! Particularly prescient points in hindsight were "personally, I would find Star Wars without a Republic/Empire conflict very un-Star-Warsy" and, in the follow-up post, "re-acquiring your old companions [...] worries me a little because adding sensible reasons for players to hunt down forty old companions doesn't sound like a thing Bioware would do in a post-class-story world". Note that while Bioware has been trying to achieve this, we still haven't got all our companions back nearly four years later, so that was clearly a bit of a Pandora's box. Or how about this one: "An MMO can't live off story alone." Still, I'm pointing all those things out with the benefit of hindsight - at the time I was cautiously optimistic about the expansion despite of my concerns.

We knew very little about Knights of the Eternal Throne when it was first teased, so my comment section was mostly conspiracy theory talk about how the people in the teaser image were probably not Senya and Vaylin (something that's quite amusing to look back on). After that we spent almost three months without getting any more information, until we finally got the official announcement... at which point we still barely knew anything, so that most of my first impressions post was about analysing the trailer.

So yeah, I used to be pretty spoiled when it came to expansions, not really valuing them all that much because they came out frequently. Someone on Twitter pointed out that Onslaught is actually going to be SWTOR's seventh expansion, which is pretty crazy when you think about it, but it's also worth noting that the first four came out within the game's first three years... and that the last one came out two and a half years ago by now. As they say: absence makes the heart grow fonder - after so much time without a chunky piece of new content, I'm definitely more excited about this one than ever!

The Rise and Fall of Knights of the Fallen Empire

I usually don't like to speculate too much about what's going on behind the scenes of any given MMO in terms of finances and player numbers, since we just don't have any useful information most of the time and it feels a bit pointless to simply make random guesses. I have been doing some thinking about the success/failure of the two Knights expansions lately though. With the release of Ossus it feels like we've finally left them behind for good and it's interesting to look at their influence in retrospective.

Also relevant: It was only recently that I stumbled across this post on popular blog Ask a Game Developer from a year ago in which the writer states that based on inside information they have, SWTOR has really managed to turn things around in the past couple of years and is now considered a financial success. Now, that information by itself appears to be a few years old already, but I still found it interesting that they explicitly state that SWTOR exceeded its projected targets for 2014 by 20 million dollars. What happened in 2014?

Most notably this was the year before Knights of the Fallen Empire, and it featured three large content updates: Galactic Starfighter, Galactic Strongholds, and Shadow of Revan. We also know from a later statement in EA's financial reports that after KotFE's launch, subscriber numbers were higher than they had been in nearly three years, so subscriptions in 2014 can't have been particularly high. Where did all that money come from then?

I think we know enough about GSF's general lack of popularity to discard that one as having been a big money maker. Strongholds on the other hand I could see having been very beneficial for the Cartel Market in particular - from what I've seen in other games, housing enthusiasts are easy targets for microtransactions: just give them more houses and new furniture to buy and you're golden! I don't see why that wouldn't have worked out well for SWTOR as well. (If so, it also shines a new light on Bioware suddenly adding three new strongholds to the game in the past two years after a long drought in that regard.)

I also fully expect that Shadow of Revan drew in a lot of players - even if I think that people overrate it in hindsight, I have no doubt that Revan's name alone must have generated a good amount of interest. SoR was also the last expansion (to date) which required a separate purchase to play, which I'm sure was another thing that added nicely to Bioware's coffers.

Now, this big success in 2014 certainly adds an interesting perspective to the release of Knights of the Fallen Empire. I always wondered how Bioware got EA to back that expansion with a big Blur trailer, as that's not how you treat a property that's supposedly been nothing but a failure. Clearly the game's performance just pre-KotFE inspired an unexpected increase in confidence.

And then came the launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire itself. It doesn't seem to have accumulated enough proper reviews to earn a metacritic score, but I know I wasn't the only one who loved it. Its overall reception was definitely positive. While trying to find more reviews, I even came across one from a gold-selling website (which I'm obviously not going to link), which happily declared the expansion a big success simply based on the amount of people who were suddenly looking to buy credits for the game. Sure, there were grumblings about the lack of new group content from the beginning, but at that point it had only been a year since Shadow of Revan, so there was plenty of time for Bioware to still add some, right? And as mentioned above, EA themselves were pleased with the bump in subscription numbers.

But what happened then? The monthly story chapters were... interesting, but not enough to get the flood of more casual players that had jumped back in for KotFE's launch to stick around. More and more long-time players became disgruntled with the lack of new group content to keep them busy. The story direction itself was also received less and less warmly over time: After my own initial enthusiasm for the launch chapters, I soon found myself saddened by the direction Bioware was taking my character and confused/annoyed by the lack of logic when it came to some of the plot's core tenets. Mid-2016, after the last few KotFE chapters were released, EA explicitly called SWTOR out in its quarterly financial report for causing a noticeable decrease in subscription revenue for the company.

In June 2017, Creative Director Charles Boyd actually took to the forums and explained that all the negative feedback they received about KotFE caused them to drastically shorten and condense KotET - originally, the "Knights of" story had been meant to form a whole trilogy, with each "season" similar to KotFE in length. However, he then quickly back-pedalled somewhat by saying that it was all just an issue of pacing and that overall, the stories of KotFE and KotET were well received and had made them their "most successful expansions by a very significant margin".

Now, I obviously wouldn't accuse Charles of lying, but especially that second comment feels a lot like we aren't getting the whole story. I understand that the whole point of the conversation in that forum thread was to show that Bioware cares about player feedback, but the claim that they basically abandoned the KotFE/KotET model just because of some forum posts despite of it being super successful rings... hollow. Presumably it was successful in some way, such as number of people who subscribed just to play through the story, but you don't just change a winning team. With that in mind and looking at just how quickly Bioware course-corrected with Knights of the Eternal Throne, it's hard to believe that the new direction wasn't having a negative effect on their bottom line somehow.

As for what's been happening since then... this is where we're back in true "nobody knows" territory. Story aside, the original introduction of Galactic Command was probably the single most harmful change ever made to the game and cost them a lot of veteran subscribers. Since then, EA has abstained from mentioning SWTOR in its financial reports or at E3 in a positive or negative way, though as previously mentioned on this blog, the last two years have felt somewhat light on new content releases.

I think the next expansion announcement will give us a better indication of where are are right now. For example, will EA back it with any sort of marketing (trailer)? I'm not fussed about these either way, but it would give an indication of how much money the company is still willing to put behind the game at this point. And of course there's the question of the scope of 6.0 - will it be big and make everyone feel like the long wait with reduced content updates will have been worth it? Most people seem to expect the big reveal to come at Star Wars Celebration in April, so we should find out soon enough.

Story Gating

Telwyn has been playing a bit of Final Fantasy XIV recently, making use of a promotion that granted him some free game time, and summed up his experiences of both the good and the bad in two recent posts. One of the negative points he mentioned was that too many of the game's features are gated behind having to complete its main storyline (for his liking anyway), in this particular case expansion content that you're not allowed to access until you've done a certain amount of "the old stuff", though I also remember seeing people complain about much earlier gates like this before, such as not being able to buy a mount until a certain point in the story.

I've never played a Final Fantasy game myself, and from what I've read about it it doesn't really sound like my cup of tea either, but as a SWTOR player I still find its approach to story very fascinating, as there seems to be a certain amount of common ground between the two MMOs when it comes to the importance given to story within the context of the game. I don't know whether being this strict in terms of questing requirements is necessarily the "right" approach, but I can't help but feel a certain amount of respect for the game's creators for sticking to their vision, even in the face of criticism (as Telwyn is far from the first person to bring this up as a problem).

What's also interesting to me is that despite of SWTOR's love for story as a "fourth pillar", it has never been this strict in terms of its story gating. Yes, the class story is very linear and does tie into the story of the galaxy as a whole, but in terms of game mechanics, the only things that were strictly gated behind story at launch were:

1. More of the same class story - you couldn't just drop it at the end of Tatooine and then pick it up again on Belsavis. If you dropped it at any point and decided to focus on levelling through other means, you had to go back and do all the quests you missed to be able to see the rest of that particular storyline.

2. Access to your companions. (This has become kind of moot with the amount of story-less companions that you are now able to pick up from promotions and the Cartel Market.)

3. Access to your personal starship.

I also seem to remember some sort of early restriction to being able to leave the starter planet if you hadn't wrapped up the story there, but I'm not sure now whether I didn't just dream that...

Either way, for all our love of SWTOR's story, dedicated players have also enjoyed pushing against its limitations for a long time. Who could forget the podcaster who levelled from 1 to cap by doing nothing but queuing for starfighter matches? Being lazy about the class story is also an ongoing joke among players who maintain raiding alts from my experience, especially when it turns out that this or that character hasn't even bothered to earn their personal starship and now has trouble actually getting around despite of already being near or at the level cap.

The initial batch of post-launch content was remarkably indifferent about continuity as well, usually not requiring any specific prerequisites before you could access it. It was just assumed that you'd done your class story and that you would be happy for the NPCs to treat you accordingly. This could actually be annoying when it would lead to unintentional spoilers via characters addressing you by the rank you hold by the end of your class story before you had actually earned it (mostly a problem for Sith characters). I remember this being particularly egregious with Makeb, before the mission terminal on the ship had been introduced and you could suddenly end up with the Rise of the Hutt Cartel intro playing out of nowhere while you were still trying to wrap up your class story.

Shadow of Revan made a valiant attempt at making sure that it made sense to all players regardless of where they were at in the story. The "miniature class story" on Rishi is inserted in such a way that it can be cut out if you start the story arc without actually having completed your class story beforehand, and there are even separate intros for characters that have or haven't done the precursory Forged Alliances missions. I was reminded of this the other day when Vulkk expressed wonder at the optional cut scenes introducing Lana and Theron on Rishi if you never met them before. (Personally I knew that this option existed, but had never played through it myself either.) I wonder how much work went into these content variations that a huge chunk of the player base never even saw?

Looking back at that now, I can't really blame Bioware for developing the desire to start fresh and with a clean slate with 4.0. Forget having all those different story variations - when a player looks at starting Knights of the Fallen Empire, the game outright tells you to better finish up any pending business beforehand as it will be a whole new world after that.

Of course that brought other issues with it. Since the "Knights of..." expansions weren't shy about branding themselves as your new personal story, it seemed to make sense to have one chapter lead into the next and so on - like the class missions, with no jumping around. The problem is that there was nothing else to do. It's one thing to have a linear storyline taking place within a huge world, where you can wander off the beaten path at any time and then backtrack later, and another to have a linear storyline when that's all there is.

Even so, Bioware once again didn't want players to feel held back for too long. Couldn't get yourself to finish all of the KotFE chapters? No worries, just jump right into KotET anyway and we'll count those last few KotFE chapters as "auto-completed"! Then again, that can cause issues yet again, as characters might suddenly find themselves saddled with a backstory that runs counter to everything they've done before.

Yes, I feel a certain amount of admiration for Final Fantasy XIV's developers and their devotion to the game's story. On the other hand, I can totally see how this rigid system can be a drag for players - and in some ways, it offers the writers and developers an easy way out, because they'll always know what exactly each player has seen and done by the time they reach any particular point in the story.

SWTOR on the other hand is constantly torn between wanting to tell a coherent story and giving players the freedom to do things in a different order if they want to. Despite of the game's strong narrative focus, it never manages to stick to requiring this or that to unlock the next piece of the story for very long. As a long-time player with many alts I appreciate that, but at the same time I often see new players get confused about what order they are supposed to do things in and whether it's sensible to skip this or that storyline. There's no winning here: If you lock events into a linear path, players will feel restricted, but if you give them the freedom to choose, others will be confused about where to go.

The more I think about it, the more sense it would make for 6.0 to wipe the slate clean once again (more or less at least), by getting us to a point where it doesn't matter much anymore what we did as the Alliance Commander and it becomes more important to look towards the future.

Shadow of Revan is Overrated

Clickbait title? Thanks to Pfannenstiel for the post idea in any case.

There is a new SWTOR podcast in town which I have yet to add to my sidebar, called The Council, and last week a Twitter poll of theirs made the rounds asking people about their favourite SWTOR expansion. I added my own vote and looked at the results, unsurprised that I wasn't part of the relative majority, and moved on without giving it any more thought.

However, this morning I found that Pfanne had written a whole post about it, detailing why he agreed strongly with the most popular choice and still considers Shadow of Revan the best expansion to date. This in turn made me want to write a post about why I strongly disagree and actually consider Shadow of Revan the worst expansion to date. Hurrah for blogger cross-fertilisation!

Now, saying that I think Shadow of Revan was SWTOR's worst expansion so far probably sounds worse than it is, because while I love to criticise and pick apart absolutely everything, I personally don't think that the game has had any truly poor expansions. I just think that all the others were better, even if Rishi is a gorgeous planet and I enjoyed the little class story epilogues that SoR gave us.

Post-launch support matters

First off, a good expansion - to me - is about more than a checklist of its launch day features. What is being done to keep things interesting afterwards? Is there ongoing support in the form of large patches and new content releases?

My own pick for best expansion, Rise of the Hutt Cartel, was an absolute star in this regard, but because it didn't tie everything together into a single coherent narrative, people like to forget that all those patches were actually still part of the RotHC content cycle. Someone in the Twitter conversation even wanted to call Oricon an expansion due to its sheer size, and that was just one of those 2.x patches. Others included CZ-198 and the three Forged Alliances flashpoints - another piece of content that people wrongly associate with another expansion (SoR), even though it was actually released months beforehand and only had the "Prelude to Shadow of Revan" label attached to it afterwards. I even joked back then that the patches were coming out faster than I could keep track of them, which is a problem I haven't had in a long time.

In comparison, Shadow of Revan's post-release scene was an absolute wasteland. I even went back to check the patch notes on the official website to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything, but it was actually the opposite: the patch notes only underlined how little there was going on during that time. For example the patch notes for 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 all made "Bounty Contract Week Returns!" one of the "highlights" because they just had nothing else to talk about. There was Ziost, and that was pretty much it. Three numbered patches for ten months of expansion time, and only one of those actually added a significant amount of new content. And to think that people accused KotFE with its near-monthly cadence of chapter and Alliance alert releases of having no content.

Hurting group play for poor solo features

At launch I only marked it as an "odd choice" that Shadow of Revan forced you into solo instances over and over again, but I actually became quite peeved once I realised that this was now the new normal. In hindsight I can see why they did it - because they wanted you to be able to smooch Theron or Lana in peace, but I still think that this was a piss-poor excuse to ruin the fun of people who were trying to level with their friends. I didn't actually mind the forced solo nature of KotFE and KotET as much because at least those expansions gave me the feeling that my character was driving the story to some extent and making choices that made a difference. If you've ever felt that KotFE and KotET's choices "didn't really matter", go back to Shadow of Revan and Ziost and tell me what great decisions your character got to make in that content. I'll wait. Makeb didn't have very exciting choices either, but at least you could play through the whole thing seamlessly with a group. SoR just combined the worst of both worlds.

It also introduced solo modes to flashpoints with that stupid GSI droid. I don't much mind giving people the ability to solo the content, but the all-powerful droid was a poor band-aid that made for incredibly boring gameplay. Crisis on Umbara is a good example of how you can make a good solo mode in my opinion.

Lack of quality control

Every patch has its bugs, but for some reason SoR sticks out in my memory as buggier than most. Maybe it wasn't - I don't have a handy list to consult for this as I have with the patch notes - but did any other expansion launch with the final part of its main story hopelessly bugged out? I seem to remember that the solo Revan fight was totally impossible to complete solo for something like a week? And of course, once it had been fixed, it was still a terribly scripted and annoying encounter that we were supposed to repeat weekly. I also remember Rishi and Yavin IV being lag hell for weeks, to the point that people said they were quitting because the game was as good as unplayable anyway.

People also like to cite that SoR launched with no less than two operations and two flashpoints, but the problem is that they really weren't that great! Blood Hunt was OK I guess, making a splash by featuring Shae Vizla in game for the first time, but Battle of Rishi was very bland and loveless. The operations were also full of bugs (there was that Coratanni exploit, the main SoR quest line not advancing after ToS completion, the infamous Underlurker remaining totally unpredictable for months) and poorly tuned. I remember Temple of Sacrifice was the first ever operation where I walked out after our first clear and instead of thinking "Wow, that was fun!" I just felt tired and worn out. I had in fact planned to record a video of our first run-through, expecting it to be a laugh, but ended up deleting all the footage because people just ended up getting tired and grumpy. It left such a bad first impression on me that I'd probably rank Ravagers and ToS as my least favourite operations to this day.

Things I Like

I'd personally rank Rise of the Hutt Cartel as my favourite expansion because I liked the game as it was at launch, and without claiming that it was perfect, the 2.x content cycle expanded the base game in a lot of ways that stayed true to the aspects I liked, even if more class and companion stories weren't in the cards at the time.

Knights of the Fallen Empire had issues with the lack of new group content and made levelling a tad too easy for my liking, but I loved the introduction of level sync as a general concept and got hours of fun out of the re-tuned group content. I dare say that my guild actually did better for itself during that time than it did in SoR. KotFE also introduced my favourite warzone of all time - no, I'm not being sarcastic. And I did enjoy getting a new story update every month, not going to lie, which means that KotFE firmly wins out over SoR in the raw fun department for me.

As for KotET - well, I'd say the jury is still out on that one! I think it was off to a strong start with the chapters, uprisings and the promise of a new operation, but Iokath was a bit of a mixed bag and it feels like updates have slowed down quite a bit over the past few months. Still, as I said above, I try to judge an expansion in its entirety, and KotET still has plenty of time left to throw out some more interesting patches.

A Farewell to the Sith Emperor

Be warned, this post contains spoilers for the Jedi knight class story, Shadow of Revan and KotFE/KotET.

The first character I ever created in SWTOR was the trooper who's still my main to this day, and I can't remember which one of the two I made first, but Jedi consular and Imperial agent were among my first alts. This meant that my image of the Sith Empire and its Emperor was pretty... fuzzy for a long time. Even on my agent he was a mysterious figure, as nobody I talked to ever seemed to know where he was, what exactly he got up to, or even what he looked like. Whenever Darth Malgus talked about acting according to the Emperor's will in a briefing, he sounded more like a religious zealot spreading a divine being's message than someone conveying what they'd been told in a private one-to-one. If there had been a plot twist later on, revealing that the Emperor was long dead and just being used as a figurehead by the Dark Council, I would have easily been able to believe it.

I realised I actually have no screenshots of the Emperor from the base game, so a shot of Malgus, who repeatedly claims to know the Emperor's will, will have to do.

Let's just say, I was in for quite a surprise when I finally levelled a Jedi knight, and later, a Sith warrior.

But that sense of mystery still stuck with me for a long time, also because Bioware kept writing the story arcs that continued the story at level fifty under the assumption that not everyone had played those two classes, so things needed explaining, yet the NPCs doing the narrating weren't exactly experts on the subject matter either. Was the Sith Emperor truly dead? It was fascinating to watch the story of a divided and confused Empire unfold on Ilum and Makeb.

Then, Shadow of Revan happened.

I didn't really have a horse in this particular race, having never played KOTOR at the time and only running a knight and warrior as relatively minor alts, but I always thought it was a bit cruel to Jedi knights to basically invalidate most of their class story. (You thought you heroically killed this guy? Nope!) At the same time it was a bit strange to make the Sith Emperor everyone's concern, from smuggler to bounty hunter. But I guess when the whole galaxy is in danger, one has to step in, regardless of one's prior role.

The Emperor's new clothes existence as disembodied shadow entity reached its peak in the Ziost story arc, where it was revealed that he was not only still alive and around, but also powerful enough to perform mass mind control on Imperial citizens and destroy an entire planet.

People were (rightly) asking where we could possibly go from there, but apparently the answer was: in a completely different direction, seemingly at random.

In Fallen Empire, it turned out that the Emperor had had a second body in a different part of the galaxy all along and had used it to get up to all kinds of hijinks. He also appeared to have received a personality transplant and suddenly lost a lot of his powers, suddenly being very dependent on his body again.

When KotFE was still very new, I wrote a somewhat frustrated post about this, hoping that some sort of explanation for what was going on was still coming. Now that we've reached the end of that story arc, I'm sad to say that this never happened. And for that reason, I'm actually pretty glad that Valkorion is dead, and hopeful that he will stay so for good now.

Don't get me wrong, I did actually enjoy fighting against all three of the Sith Emperor's incarnations. I really liked how mysterious he was to most classes in the original story. I suppose the incorporeal, planet-eating version of the character was my least favourite, mostly because he had no motivations we could understand beyond being insane and the question of how exactly we were going to fight him was never really explored. Valkorion, while totally inconsistent with everything that had come before, was at least an interesting character ins his own right (which was undoubtedly helped a lot by Darin De Paul's excellent voice acting).

Still, I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at Bioware when they decided how the KotFE arc should come about. At least from the outside, it looks more than ever as if they just wanted to get away from what had come before and create something completely different. Claiming that Valkorion was actually the Sith Emperor was simply a weak way of retaining some kind of tie to the existing story, even if it made no sense for a being in his position to suddenly go back to being trapped inside and dependent on a single body.

Either way, I think he's been used for all he was worth and then some. It's time to give the guy some rest and let galactic politics unfold without him. I was ready for that by 2.0, and I'm still happy to see what's coming now.

What's the deal with Valkorion?

This post contains spoilers for the Shadow of Revan story, including Ziost, as well as for some of the early chapters of Knights of the Fallen Empire. Read at your own risk!

As much as I've generally enjoyed the KotFE story so far, there's one thing that's been bugging me about it: Valkorion.

Shadow of Revan's main story arc ended with the Emperor being newly strengthened, if still incorporeal. Then things went wild on Ziost to show us just how powerful he had become: not only could he possess countless people at once, including trained Jedi Masters, but he could also consume a whole planet just for the fun of it. I remember Rohan commenting that the character seemed to have become too powerful for it to be very believable that we, the player characters, could still defeat him.

Then the Knights of the Fallen Empire announcement came and we were all a bit confused. What did any of this have to do with Vitiate? Surely we weren't suddenly going to ignore the biggest threat to the known galaxy? Players like Xam Xam did intricate research in an attempt to tie it all together, but it all sounded a bit far-fetched (to me) any way you sliced it.

I was pretty shocked when the big mystery was already solved in chapter one of Fallen Empire and that it was really as trite as Vitiate = Valkorion.

Your character has the option to express confusion about this on a couple of occasions, and of course you have Lana and Koth to embody and remind you of the two opposing and seemingly irreconcilable viewpoints of Vitiate still being his same old self, just in a new disguise, or Valkorion supposedly being a fine old chap and generous ruler. However, you get so swept up in the events of your escape and everything that happens afterwards that there isn't much time to think about the subject in depth.

Fortunately I could suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy the ride, but the problem of Vitiate and Valkorion supposedly being the same character kept nagging at me at the back of my mind the entire time. First off, there is the feeling that the whole premise simply violates everything we've known so far. The Sith Emperor has always been described as supremely powerful, but not without limits. The Jedi knight story has a heavy focus on fighting him, and there are parts of the Sith warrior story that also show that the Emperor's powers could be curbed by cunning individuals. That we are supposed to accept that during all this time he also happened to inhabit a different body half a galaxy away does not mesh with this at all.

And then of course there is the problem of personalities. The way Vitiate is described in the lore is basically as batshit insane. Even as a baby he was emotionless and scary, and went on to torture and kill his own parents at a young age. While he certainly possessed a certain amount of cunning, he was never the subtle type. He enjoyed killing and made no secret of it. He's basically just an extremely powerful psychopath.

And then we have Valkorion, who entered a relationship with a Zakuulian woman that seemed genuinely loving at least at first and which produced no less than three children. His subjects have nothing but praise for him and the way we see him in KotFE he comes across as incredibly charismatic and impossible to truly read. You might want to argue that it's just good old Vitiate putting on a show again, but it just doesn't fit Vitiate's character in my opinion... not like this.

I have a hard time imagining how Bioware is going to come up with a convincing solution for this dilemma that won't feel incredibly forced. I suspect that it will come down to Vitiate and Valkorion not being quite the same, perhaps different aspects of him or something. There was one line during my Marauder's playthrough which caught my eye, though I don't remember the exact wording - my character said something about how she immediately recognised her old Emperor in Valkorion's throne room, and Valkorion replied with a comment about how it's a shame that she didn't see other things quite so clearly... which I understood to be an implication that there is more to the Vitiate = Valkorion equation than meets the eye. I hope it won't be too similar to the solution to the Revan storyline though.

What do other people think about this?

Too Many Alts or Not Enough Variety?

I've always loved rolling alts. Back in World of Warcraft, I had created a whole bunch of alts before my first character even hit the level cap... and over time, my stable only grew. I like to roll different classes and species to view the (virtual) world through different eyes. It's a way of playing that offers variety both in terms of gameplay as well as in terms of immersion. ("What does it mean to be a fighter in this world as opposed to be a healer? Or to belong to one faction instead of another?")

With its promise of eight unique class stories, SWTOR was always going to be an altoholic's dream. On the whole, I feel that it has indeed lived up to that promise. It took me nearly two years to complete all the game's class stories, and each of them offered a unique piece to the puzzle that is The Old Republic as a whole. You may even find it questionable how much content is hidden away in some class stories - for example the role and whereabouts of the Sith emperor are quite opaque until you've played a Jedi knight and a Sith warrior. Or how about the fact that the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic just changes from one person to another one day - for which the only explanation is found in the bounty hunter story? I've levelled a multitude of alts to explore all these different aspects of the in-game universe and have loved every minute of it.

Lately though... I've been feeling a bit burnt out on my alts, and I've been wondering why that is.

It started with a joking throwaway comment in my post about making an alt on the Progenitor, how I would feel guilty if I just made another character on the Red Eclipse that I then wouldn't find the time to play anyway. But it's definitely been remarkable how refreshing and freeing it feels to play on the Progenitor. When I log in there, Agent Shintar is all I have to worry about. It's limiting in some ways to not have a huge legacy of characters that can provide assistance in the form of resources, but it also makes life a lot simpler and carefree. But why should alts feel like a burden?

I remembered an old post of Syl's (or two), in which she talked about why she personally dislikes alts and why they are not for her. She makes some interesting points about how alts can negatively affect gameplay, but the most interesting thing to me was actually my own comment to that post back in 2011. I always think it's a bit conceited and possibly absurd to quote yourself, but just this once I'll bite the bullet. I was still playing WoW back then and this is what I had to say about it:

"I’ve definitely noticed a certain “alt burnout” in myself that started in WOTLK, due to the accessibility changes. In BC all my alts eventually hit some sort of progression ceiling, and that was good because it kept them alts. While my main was raiding Black Temple, my alts became Champions of the Naaru and I could be proud of it. But in WOTLK, it all became kind of samey. Every time the badges got updated, all my alts could upgrade their entire gear. They could all raid Trial of the Crusader. It actually felt kind of tiring, and I’m still struggling a bit with where to draw the line in Cataclysm."

The thing that made me tire of alts a bit back then was that they were all doing the same content at the same time. There was no distinction anymore between the main that you were always trying to keep on the cutting edge and say, the alt that was only ever doing the lower tier content but had a reason to actually keep doing it. And if I look at it, I think this is kind of the problem that I currently have in SWTOR as well. In fact, in some ways it's surprising that I haven't noticed it being an issue any earlier, even if gear gating is less of a "thing" in SWTOR than it is in WoW. The story matters a lot though.

If eight different class stories were an altoholic's dream, then the revelation that the class stories weren't going to be continued after launch should have shattered that dream long ago. But I suppose it didn't really matter at first, because it was always going to take me some time to actually see all the content that the game launched with. With Makeb, I guess the first cracks started to show, but at the same time, it wasn't too bad. I completed that planetary quest chain on some characters but not on others, and while I felt vaguely guilty about it since the loading screen summaries kept reminding me that it was supposed to be chapter four of my class story, it wasn't too big a deal. It was just one more story. There was little reason to go to Makeb outside of it because its dailies sucked anyway, and Toborro's Courtyard wasn't an operation you wanted to keep running on a regular basis. Completing Makeb wasn't a requirement to move on to CZ-198 or Oricon.

This sounds pretty terrible in some way, doesn't it? "I didn't mind that all my characters were prompted to go to Makeb because I didn't have to and didn't miss much if I didn't." But there is value in not feeling too tied down. Currently, any of my alts that are level 55 or higher feel very tied down. (The lower level ones are fine, honestly. It's not like I've done all the class stories multiple times, and stuff like "jumping into lowbie PvP" provides alternate gameplay that I can't experience on my main.)

But for those alts near the level cap, it feels like the path to progression that's open to them is all the same, and it's only getting same-ier. Shadow of Revan has brought with it an increased amount of linearity. Do the four Forged Alliances flashpoints in the correct order. Do Rishi. Do Yavin 4. Do Ziost. It's all got to be done in that order or not at all. I actually enjoyed repeating the main Shadow of Revan story arc multiple times because it was well done, not to mention the massive carrot that awaited on Rishi in the form of the new class missions. But then we got the next part of the story and... you can't even do it unless you completed what came before. It makes complete sense from a narrative point of view, but it also feels so limiting. I can't take my Scoundrel or my Marauder to Ziost just for fun (not without a guild ship summon anyway) because neither of them has completed the SoR storyline.

Ziost itself, while a great piece of content in some way, feels like it has limited replayability as well. It feels like it was mainly added to drive the story forward and doesn't have much purpose beyond that. I have to confess that as much as I've gushed about it, I've only actually completed the Ziost storyline on Shintar and one of my Imperial alts - that's it. I keep thinking that I probably "should" go and move more characters forward through it (because I do like their play style and their back stories), but the thought that all of them will just be going through the exact same motions as my first two characters is honestly quite a downer.

I thought I'd accepted the class stories ending on Corellia. I figured if Bioware kept adding more planets like Makeb or Oricon, they would eventually build a levelling path with enough content that you could mix things up on alts. But with Shadow of Revan it looks increasingly like we're all going to be playing the same linear story on all of our alts, and that chafes. I suppose that whatever ends up happening with the Emperor will only be playable after you've completed Ziost or it won't make any sense, but I hope that after this, Bioware will reconsider this highly limited and linear approach to storytelling. I'm actually okay with linear stories in MMOs... as long as you can either choose out of a selection of several different stories, or the game still gives you enough options on the side to mix it up and make alt play interesting. Right now, it seems that those options are rapidly diminishing as all our characters are being funnelled into a single storyline, leaving them with nowhere else to go (unless you want to do nothing but PvP I guess).

The Imperial Class Missions on Rishi in Review

Back in February I shared my thoughts on the new Shadow of Revan class missions on Republic side; now I'm finally ready to do the same for all the Imperial classes. Spoilers abound.

Sith Inquisitor

Like the one for the Jedi consular, I enjoyed that the inquisitor class mission reminds you that your character is actually supposed to be quite a big deal, this time in form of Moff Pyron giving you a summary of all the things your various minions have supposedly been up to lately. It doesn't really drive the story forward, but it feels good.

This was also the first class mission I played through that actually featured a companion - you have to do it with Talos by your side. Some people might find that restrictive, but personally I enjoyed the fact that the Inquisitor got some actual companion interaction when most other classes didn't.

The actual core of the story was... weird. The Sith inquisitor is another class that actually introduces a new character, a Sith researcher whose services you "inherited", which works well enough... but the actual story about his research is flat out weird and not very credible. It would probably make for an interesting starting point if they ever continue the class stories from here, but as it stands it's not very convincing. Nonetheless I didn't mind too much because everything else about the mission was good fun.

Imperial Agent

The Imperial agent brings back not one but two beloved characters and lets you wallow in nostalgia by talking to them about things that matter. It's quite impressive how well the writers managed to invoke the spirit of the long and convoluted agent story, even as they were limited to working with content that only takes about ten minutes of active playtime to get through.

What I found most striking about the agent story was that technically, in terms of gameplay mechanics it follows the exact same pattern as the smuggler story (go click on three things around Raider's Cove, then kill a dude), but where the smuggler story fell completely flat for me, this one was a major success in my eyes. Clearly the "fluff" surrounding each mission matters.

Sith Warrior

The Sith warrior mission is the one that most closely ties in with the main Shadow of Revan storyline, and while I enjoyed it, it mostly left me feeling kind of sad for my Marauder. The whole current plot development about the Emperor effectively leaves the warrior severely displaced. By the end of your chapter three, you are completely defined by your role as "Emperor's Wrath" - but where does that leave you if the Emperor has proven himself to be insane and his remaining close servants are all members of a death cult?

Bounty Hunter

The bounty hunter story starts with an emotional punch in the gut - Crysta Markon, your former handler from the Great Hunt, is dead, and her daughter needs help with getting revenge and getting herself out of trouble. This fits with the bounty hunter's theme of "everyone you care about is going to die", but while this was a bit of a hit-and-miss affair for most of the main class story, this one really hit home for me. I guess it helped that I had completed the Forged Alliances arc only hours before, which meant that I had been getting letters from Crysta in the mail about what a good time she was having. In fact, due to the delayed nature of those messages, I received one of them after I had completed the mission that mentions her death, which was just all kinds of weird.

As an additional gut punch, the people responsible for Crysta's death and whom you're sent out to kill have been trashing your reputation as well: you're supposed to be an "Imperial pet" that has no bite in underworld circles anymore, and one of the gang leaders you kill sounds genuinely bewildered that you would even care about going after them.

Combine this with the fact that this is the other class story that actually features a companion (Mako), and this was possibly my favourite of the new Imperial class stories - somewhat to my surprise, since the bounty hunter in general did not impress me with its class story in the base game.

So what's the difference between beating Revan solo vs. in the operation?

This is a question that has been on my mind at one time or another pretty much ever since I heard that Shadow of Revan was going to give you a separate option to complete its story line solo or in a group.

What I didn't expect was that it would take me about four months to actually get the answer to that question from first-hand experience. I knew that the final solo fight was pretty horrifically bugged during Shadow of Revan's early access period, but I didn't expect the operations mission to be bugged as well - and to go unfixed for months.

Specifically the problem was that the mission just wouldn't update for some people (including me), with no known workaround other than to try again the next week and see if it worked then. For me this was annoying in so far as I had chosen to experience the operations story path on one of my alts, and while I run ops pretty much every week, getting to do so on an alt is much rarer. I think it was finally on my fourth or fifth completion of Temple of Sacrifice on my Sage that I also received credit for "The Enemy Within" and was finally able to see the alternate ending.

So... was it worth it? Both on a personal level to see both "versions" of the ending and on a development level to even make two different endings? Honestly, I'm not sure.

First off it's worth mentioning that the actual ending is completely unaffected by your choice - the actual ending being the showdown with Revan on the Forgotten Terrace (the one that you can repeat as a weekly) and a solo mission, regardless of which path you choose.

So effectively the only thing that's different is one of the missions that lead up to this ending, which require you to either complete Temple of Sacrifice once or to do a round of dailies. In hindsight it honestly feels like much ado about nothing.

The operation is cool, but if you're the kind of person who enjoys running operations, you're going to do so with or without an extra quest to go there. Choosing the operations path also has the side effect that you're locked out of being able to do the dailies until you complete the ops mission, which was quite a nuisance, especially with the mission continuously bugging out and refusing to complete.

In the end there isn't even much of a difference in terms of NPC reaction. I was hoping that if I chose the operations path (which officially means "personally leading a small strike team into the Temple") the very least I would get would be a hearty pat on the back from Satele Shan. Instead you get pretty much the same cut scene as when you choose the daily version, with the voice-over coming down to: "Good job with stopping Revan, now look at our forces 'securing' the Temple after you've already done all the work". Pfft.

I think in the future I would advise Bioware not to bother with such a "dual path system" again. Even if you ignore all the bugs for a second, the solo/daily path was pretty much always going to be more convenient simply because it didn't halt all your progress until you could get an ops run together... and even if you like grouping up and running operations, you would be doing so with or without that mission, so that there's little reason not to go for the more convenient solo path just to see the ending of the quest and to unlock access to the dailies.

If you tried both story paths on Yavin 4, how did it work out for you?