So THERE's That Skytrooper Control Device!

My review of KotFE's chapter 15, The Gemini Frequency, has been showing up in my "recently popular posts" widget for a few weeks now, and I have a strong suspicion that it's less because of people wanting to read my thoughts on it and more because of this sentence: "Where is that damned skytrooper control device?!" Unfortunately anyone looking for the answer via Google would have been disappointed by my post as I was merely sharing my ignorance rather than offering up any kind of help.

I discussed this with Calphy the other day and as it turns out he actually knew what it looked like and described it to me. I decided to use my new-found knowledge when playing through chapter fifteen on my Scoundrel this week, and was flabbergasted to find the damn thing lying right in front of me in plain sight. Is it randomised or did they move it recently? I'm not sure how I otherwise could have failed to find it right next to the lore object three times in a row (it's that little briefcase-shaped thing)...

Anyway, I really wanted to share this knowledge now, so I also screenshotted the locations on each deck where I found the devices:

Have fun with your new (temporary) skytrooper pet! The Gemini Captain seemed to hate mine with a passion and obliterated it as soon as I started the fight.

Thoughts on the Datamined 5.0 Class Changes

I've been trying to avoid obvious story spoilers for KotET, but I usually don't mind knowing about mechanical changes in advance. However, even if I had tried to avoid learning about them, it would have been pretty hard to do, as my guildies have been chattering away about them on the forums and on voice chat ever since the information was released by data miners, making it pretty much impossible to ignore what's going on. Eventually I just wanted to know for myself how justified any cries about possible nerfs could really be.

The full Jedipedia post can be found here. I won't go into detail about all the different class changes - just check the nicely laid out post for yourself if there's anything specific you want to know - but what they've labelled as "global changes" is certainly worth talking about.

First off, it's time to say bye-bye to base classes. Somehow this feels like both a monumental and an inconsequential change at once. It's inconsequential because generally you pick an advanced class at level ten and that's it. I've known people to level to cap as their base class for a laugh, but that's not really intended or very interesting gameplay.

But at the same time... there was something interesting about a single class splitting into two very different specialisations with no turning back. It's not something that's seen a lot in Western MMOs, though I seem to remember an MMO blogger I read once commenting on the subject that Everquest II had advanced classes too once upon a time. I guess it's telling that that game moved away from that system as well.

Personally I always thought those little quests that are supposed to explain the advanced classes from a lore point of view were very cute; I particularly liked the two bounty hunters actually brawling with you to take your measure. Might be time to create even more alts and record these missions on video before they disappear? And of course your base class is what defines your class story - no matter how different they make Commandos and Vanguards, they'll both always start out as the newest member of Havoc Squad. I'm kind of curious how they'll overhaul character creation for this. Hopefully it will make things easier to understand for new players, which I'm pretty sure is the goal. To be fair, I can see where they are coming from with this one - pretty much every time I watch a stream or video of someone new to the game trying it out for the first time, it takes them ages to figure out that they are supposed to pick an advanced class.

In line with this, various abilities that were tied to the base class until now will be distributed between the advanced classes instead. Some of these will barely be worth a shrug - I don't remember the last time I used Charged Burst on my Scoundrel - but others definitely sting. Bounty hunters without Death from Above? Smugglers without Dirty Kick? Inquisitors without Force Lightning? Ouch. Personally I will miss Stockstrike and Pulse Cannon on my Commando. Stockstrike was a handy instant to use on enemies that were right up in my face, and Pulse Cannon just looked damn cool, making me prefer it over Hail of Bolts any day of the week, despite of the melee requirement and the cooldown. Mind you, this isn't the first time they've done stuff like that, it's just happening on an unprecedented scale. I still remember the days when my Scoundrel had XS Freighter Flyby and my Vanguard had Full Auto. However, I guess that ultimately these changes will have the same effect that those earlier prunings had, which is to say not much of one... except for the occasional burst of nostalgia making me shake my fist, going "damn you, Bioware", and then immediately moving on.

The one notable exception to this that I've seen and which appears to have created by far the most outrage is the proposed removal of Phase Walk from Shadows and Assassins. The difference in this case is that this was never a base class ability - it was introduced in 2.0 for those advanced classes only and fit the theme of the stealthy attacker coming seemingly out of nowhere. That it was also given to Sages and Sorcs in 4.0 seemed kind of odd, but I think most people just shrugged it off. However, restricting it to those two ACs only all of a sudden just makes no sense and I can completely understand why people who play a Shadow or Assassin as their main are annoyed. I still hope that Bioware will reconsider that change at least. (After all, datamined information isn't final.)

Stances and cells will also become baseline to each spec so you can't change between them anymore without also changing spec. Again, this kind of feels like a big deal and yet another loss of choice, but is it really? I can't remember the last time I switched Shintar out of combat support cell except by an accidental misclick! Now you won't get noobs running around in the wrong stance or power cell for their spec anymore, which I'm sure is one of the aims behind this change. I would have said that it's probably also targeted towards reducing "skank tanking" as it is known in PvP, which is to say using certain tanking abilities without going all-out tank, except that another "global change" listed on Jedipedia is that Guard will not be tied to tanking forms anymore, which would actually encourage its use for non-tanks. Huh. Maybe that's only a temporary change or something got misinterpreted while compiling the information.

Apparently roleplaying is also complicated, which is why any distinction between droids and other mobs is being removed. So from the looks of it abilities like Awe or Sleep Dart will work on droids too in the future, but the current droid-only crowd controls are being removed. I don't mind the former too much, but the latter sucks, because Disable Droid and its equivalents were - while situational - the only long-duration crowd control without a cooldown, and one of the few utilities that pure dps classes like Gunslingers and Sentinels could bring to a group. Being able to awe a droid for eight seconds instead won't be nearly as useful.

Finally, from the category of "plain odd": Melee players will be given more mobility and stealth players won't risk being spotted anymore when they are close to you. Just... huh? I don't really see why either of those things needed adjusting across the board. Stealth in particular is already an incredibly powerful tool as it is when it comes to PvP and really didn't need buffing. I also bet you that it won't apply in PvE and that there'll still be plenty of mobs that throw you out of stealth when they see you sneak past.

In summary, the overall theme is clearly one of simplification and the removal of yet more hybrid elements that somehow survived the introduction of disciplines in 3.0. I'm not part of the crowd that tends to complain about "dumbing down", but the problem with these things is that a single change is never a big deal, but once you pile enough of them on top of each other it can lead to classes genuinely losing their flavour. Let's hope that we're not quite there yet.

KOTOR Continued: Look, Ma, I'm a Jedi!

In my first post about playing KOTOR I didn't include any spoiler warnings because I barely scratched the surface of what the game is about, but I guess as I write about my progress, some proper plot spoilers might end up showing up sooner or later. So if you've never played KOTOR yourself and still care about avoiding spoilers for it... consider yourself warned.

First off, after Calphy's comment on the last post I double-checked all the settings and found an option to turn off the auto-pause after every combat round. Yes! This was sorely needed, especially as I started to run up against fights that were made hard mainly by 95% of my attacks failing to hit their target, making the fights really, really long. I daren't imagine how much worse it would've been if the game had paused after every combat round on top of it all.

So, after escaping those annoying Sith fighters above Taris, your next stop is the Jedi enclave on Dantooine. If you were wondering at the start of the game why a game called Knights of the Old Republic wouldn't let you create anything but some sort of soldier type character, here comes the answer: It turns out you're Force sensitive after all!

I thought it was interesting that the Jedi make you undergo three trials before you even get promoted to padawan. This kind of surprised me as I tend to think of padawan as the lowest rank there is. Is there some sort of lore explanation for this or is it just a matter of power creep that in SWTOR your Jedi characters already start out as padawans and get promoted as soon as they finish the starter planet?

Once you get accepted into the Jedi order, you also get asked to choose a class: Guardian, Sentinel or consular. Hah! You can definitely see that SWTOR took inspiration for its class system from here, as the descriptions of Guardians and consulars are pretty spot-on. It's just Sentinels as something between the two that doesn't really fit into my world view as established by the MMO. In SWTOR they are mainly marked by their wielding of two sabers and by having a short attention span.

While exploring Dantooine, you keep running into Kath hounds. For some reason most of them look quite different from the ones in SWTOR. Seems we only have the horned version in the MMO.

There was a quest to solve a murder mystery which clearly served as inspiration for Broonmark's Alliance alert, though the KOTOR version is more demanding, offering you a bunch of wrong options to click through before you get to the correct answer.

Then there was a side mission that has been copied into SWTOR almost wholesale: the obsessive lady missing her pet droid (found in the Nar Shaddaa bonus series on Republic side). Interestingly, the KOTOR version is both funnier ("She treats me like her dead husband!" "Er, all the time?" "You don't want to know...") and darker, with the smothered droid wanting to commit suicide to escape it all, which kind of forces you to choose between a rock and a hard place. I guess that's why SWTOR made the droid an astromech and had him escape to live with an enclave of free droids, which makes it a much more obvious choice between light and dark side.

What you could call the main side mission is about two feuding houses whose children are in love with each other. Hm, where have I heard that before? It was an enjoyable storyline nonetheless. The only thing that bugged me was that the two fathers remained mad at each other and the matter of the other missing son was never resolved. I can't help but wonder whether it would have made a difference if I had found his datapad sooner (he appeared to have been eaten by Kath hounds as far as I could tell). However, after the two lovers had run off, there was no opportunity to ever bring the matter up again, neither with the young man's father nor with his sister.

Anyway, I keep talking about side quests, but the main goal after passing my Jedi trials was to investigate some ancient ruins with Bastila, because a vision had indicated that Revan and Malak had found something powerful there. The mystery of the ancient aliens is set up well, even though I already know who they are (and not just because the Rakata Prime background music was playing in the background). I was just annoyed by the two droids I had to fight my way past, which was the awfully tedious bit of combat I referred to at the beginning of this post. I sure hope there is some better way to get past them and I just chose a bad option, otherwise that's pretty bad gameplay. I actually went broke from buying medpacks just to survive long enough to beat both of them.

Now I'm supposed to explore the galaxy to find the missing pieces of a mysterious star map. Oddly enough, having such a specific goal has actually reduced my motivation somewhat. Running around randomly was more fun! But we'll see how it goes.

Shroud of Memory

HK bonus chapter day, hooray!
 

First off I have to say: While I think that this a really neat subscriber reward, it would be a real waste if an hour of such solid content was forever restricted to everyone who happened to be subbed at a certain time. Maybe they'll make it available as a cash shop purchase later on or something.

As it happened, the chapter and I weren't off to the greatest start (and from what I heard many people experienced the same problem): The initial dozen combat encounters or so were laggy as hell. So you're thrown into your first fight with a hotbar full of abilities you don't know, they don't seem to fire when you press them, and mobs are teleporting all over the place...  suckage! It's not as if you're about to die with an OP companion healing you, but you're just sort of waving your arms around ineffectively and it's not very satisfying. Fortunately things seemed to improve somewhat (at least for me) as the chapter progressed.

Also, I wasn't too enamoured with Z0-0M at first. It seemed like both her writer and her voice actor were trying way too hard to make her funny, to the point that she came across as just plain annoying. (I get that she's meant to be a nuisance to HK... but it's way too easy to sympathise with him.)

However, things got better. Some interesting bits of lore were revealed, and you progress through a couple of very fascinating environments, walking along the bottom of the ocean just to be shot up into space shortly afterwards. The things you can do when you're a droid...

Speaking of which, I found the general concept of playing as HK interesting, because I expect that this will open up more opportunities to play as a different character in the future. It seemed like HK was basically applied as a "skin" on top of your regular character. In the target of target window I was still labelled as Shintar, I always had combat support cell on, and various healing buffs procced during the fights. Also, I seemed to hit about as hard as a sponge - very inappropriate for an assassin droid - so I'm guessing that HK's combat abilities were somehow scaled off your usual damage numbers.

I was also delighted to find that your choices in the "Arma Rasa" recruitment mission seemed to be taken into consideration, as there was a moment where I selected the option to kill someone, but instead HK's hand only hovered above the button and he bemoaned his master's programming forbidding him to kill unarmed non-combatants.

And then of course there was the ending... this is where it could get a bit spoilery (though I'll still avoid being explicit)! I had somewhat mixed feelings about it. On the one hand it was quite an interesting twist... on the other hand it felt kind of disappointing to see an excellent villain whose portrayal had been 100% serious up until then be disposed of via such a slapstick move. I'm still kind of hoping that it was all just another trick by the real Shroud, though Z0-0M's description in the companion panel doesn't leave much hope.

Overall I quite enjoyed this chapter. The lag was my biggest annoyance, but presumably that will be fixed soon. It wasn't quite as funny as I had hoped after seeing some of the comments by the writers - I don't think there was a single lough-out-loud moment for me personally - but there were plenty of things to make you smile, and I realised that I've been missing that. Humour has always been an important part of Star Wars, and chapters ten to sixteen have mostly been pretty damn serious, with the exception of chapter thirteen's big heist. So yeah, it was good to poke a bit of fun at things again - I particularly liked what they did with the exarch in that regard.

Did you qualify for the bonus chapter? If so, what did you think of it? Or has the lag kept you away?

The Defector

I mentioned in my last DvL post that I had decided to level my "event agent" through the class story. After finishing that particular endeavour, I thought it deserved a post of its own.

First off, the levelling experiment: As I mentioned in the previous post, I ended up using this character as an experiment to see how far I could get doing just the class story and nothing else / at which point my level would fall far enough behind that I couldn't continue as before. The answer? It never happened. I dinged 50 while wrapping up the last couple of companion conversations after completing my final mission. I'm still astounded by that. Yes, I did get some exploration XP and I was also rested a lot of the time, but still... basically, it seems to be really hard now to be underlevelled for your class story.

Also, it really showed that I hadn't done the agent story in a long time because from Hoth onwards (which is how far I'd got my Cathar agent last year), I ran into a lot of things that I barely remembered. There will be some spoilers for chapters two and three of the agent story here.

On Hoth, where you interact with the Chiss, I was pleasantly surprised by all the lines that took into account that my agent was a Chiss too. I shamelessly flirted with Aristocra Saganu, the Chiss leader, and he was so pleased with me that he actually adopted me into his noble house by the end. I think if Bioware had any specific species/class combinations in mind while creating the class stories, then Chiss agent was definitely one of them. There was another species-specific reference like that on Voss, when I was asked about my past at the Shrine of Healing.

Revisiting the agent story on Voss was nice in general because while the part with Bas-Ton and his family had been very memorable, I also have this vague recollection that everything else kind of confused me during my first playthrough. Maybe it was because I had taken a break for too long at the time, maybe I got distracted by side quests, but I do recall not quite being able to make heads or tails of what the Shining Man had to do with anything. This time around it was all much clearer.

Corellia just reminded me of why I dislike that planet: Aside from the war-torn environment being kind of depressing, the maps are confusing and you constantly end up being lured into dead ends. There was one point where it took me something like fifteen minutes to find the right way to access one of my quest objectives... and I've been playing this game for nearly five years. FFS, Corellia.

Getting to redo all the companion stories was pretty fascinating as well. I remember absolutely loathing Kaliyo after that last mission on Hutta on my first agent, and if I'd had the option I would have shot here right then and there. Yet somehow, this time it didn't seem nearly as bad. I'm not sure if that's because I knew what to expect, different conversation choices made it sound like less of a big deal, or a bit of both, but I could actually see my character tolerating Kaliyo's continued presence despite of not liking her very much.

Vector is still my favourite romanceable companion in the game; he's just too adorable. I married him this time. Scorpio freaked me out a bit because I had completely forgotten about the part where she tries out a holographic human form for a bit.

In general, there were some interesting interactions between the different companions as well, such as Vector and Doctor Lokin developing a sort of friendship, Lokin spying on Kaliyo, Vector trying to understand Scorpio and more, which was quite fascinating considering what a varied bunch the agent companions are.

Finally, let's talk about what was the actual impetus for levelling this character through the class story: wanting to see a different ending, specifically the one where you agree to be a double agent for the Republic. Vrykerion mentioned in his chapter two review that he had never managed to get it in several playthroughs, though a commenter chimed in to say that it wasn't hard to get, you just weren't allowed to do anything that would majorly incline Ardun Kothe against you, such as get one of his team members killed.

I actually knew very little about how it would all play out. I just knew that there was a confrontation with Ardun Kothe on Quesh, but even though I let him live there, he just ran away and didn't seem to be any more positively inclined towards me than before. I got worried that I had messed up somehow and googled a video of the actual defection scene... which ended up starting on Corellia (I didn't watch any further than that once I realised this). Someone in the video's comments was complaining that he had made all the same choices as in the video but still hadn't been asked to join the SIS in the end, and eventually seemed to trace it back to a conversation on Quesh where he hadn't offered assistance to Saber and Wheels - which I hadn't done either. Argh!

I felt kind of gloomy after that, certain that I had already messed up my chances of getting the ending that I wanted without even knowing it and cursing Bioware for apparently tying it to what seemed like such a minor choice. If only this was a single player game and I could reload an earlier save... however, there was a happy ending after all, because when I came to the crucial junction at the very end, Ardun Kothe did offer me a job and I was able to accept it. I don't know why it didn't work for that guy in the YouTube comments, but it must have been due to something else.

Now I actually really want to get back to my Cathar agent (who is a bit evil and sided with Jaedus) to see how things play out for her. I'll put it on my to-do list for whenever I'm done with the DvL event.

Flashpoint Friday: Star Fortress

I was initially hesitant about whether to include the Star Fortresses in this series or not, which is why I left them until the very end. I eventually decided in favour because there is no denying that they are labelled as [FLASHPOINT] in game, even though they have very little in common with any of the other flashpoints.

General Facts

Star Fortress is a level 65 flashpoint accessed from Odessen that requires you to have made it up to chapter nine of Knights of the Fallen Empire. (In case that doesn't already give it away, it was added to the game with the release of KotFE in October 2015.) You cannot enter a Star Fortress any other way, even if you are grouped with someone else who has them unlocked. They also aren't part of the group finder and need to be entered straight from the Alliance base.

While every Star Fortress is the same in terms of gameplay, there are technically supposed to be six different ones: one each above Alderaan, Belsavis, Nar Shaddaa, Hoth, Tatooine and Voss.

Unlike regular flashpoints, the Star Fortresses are not designed for a group of four players. Instead they have an easy solo version and a heroic mode, with the heroic mode still being soloable if you are both sufficiently geared and skilled. The heroic mode follows the same basic format as the solo mode except that everything has a lot more health, and the final boss fight has you facing off against a different opponent that is considerably harder than the end boss of solo mode.

Also, unlike in regular flashpoints, if you die, you can't simply pick things up right where you were defeated previously but instead wake up in a prison cell and have to go through a little sequence to free yourself and escape.

Fights

Similar to Kuat Drive Yards, the Star Fortresses have a modular design that is random every time you enter one. Excluding the boss level, the skytrooper production level in the middle (which is the same every time) and the two "transitional" levels which just consist of a short walkway, each instance consists of four floors you have to fight your way through, with each floor potentially having three different layouts as far as I could tell. Unlike in Kuat Drive Yards however, there are no different objectives to pursue here.

Example: The first floor could look like any of these.

There is little excitement to be had while fighting your way through the levels, as your opposition consists of Zakuulan troops and droids that pose little challenge. At one point in the instance, a bonus objective will light up, highlighting a certain room you have to clear out, which will earn you reputation with your currently active companion and with the one associated with that particular Star Fortress (see story section below). Also, one of the upper levels and one of the lower levels will contain a named "paladin", basically a hard-hitting Knight of Zakuul that serves as a sort of bonus boss. There are achievements for killing all of these.

Otherwise the only bosses you have to face are the Skytrooper Praetorian on the skytrooper production level, who uses various stuns and summons adds, and the instance end boss. On solo mode, this is the AI Ephemeris, which initially sics adds on you until you destroy its backup power cores, which results in it possessing a droid body that you can then kill.

On heroic mode, the final boss is the Exarch overseeing the Star Fortress (a special type of Knight), and you cannot face him or her until you've chased them all the way around the station's central sun reactor. This is quite challenging as the chase consists of several phases, each of which has the Exarch being guarded by two gold mobs, and more weak opponents continually streaming into the room, all while you have to interact with a console and sometimes kill a special add to move the encounter to the next phase.

None of the bosses drop "traditional" flashpoint loot - instead you gain lots of decorations as well as various item level 208 mods and enhancements, which is the same level as the gear you can buy with common data crystals. Additionally there are quite a few achievements that encourage you to re-run the place, including the ones to kill the paladins already mentioned, as well as ones to find lore objects or take on special challenges. If you get your influence level with your Alliance experts up to ten, there are also hidden caches on each level that you can unlock for extra combat abilities. I've previously written a bit more about some of these features here.

Story

Not much story takes place inside each Star Fortress, however the story arc surrounding them is actually quite interesting. In KotFE chapter four Lana mentions that Arcann has had powerful battle stations built in orbit around several planets to keep their population in line. This is brought up again in chapter nine, when the actual side story arc for the Star Fortresses becomes available.

Planets that are being suppressed in this fashion are Alderaan, Belsavis, Nar Shaddaa, Hoth, Tatooine and Voss, and while you have a contact on each of these planets, you know too little about the interior of a Star Fortress to take action right away. You get tasked with exploring one of them to find out more, which means doing any one of them on solo mode first. While doing this, you learn that each Fortress is protected by a ground-based shield generator that needs to be destroyed before the Fortress itself becomes vulnerable (very Return of the Jedi-like).

After this, Alliance alerts for the contacts on the six planets pop up in your companion panel, and you can start each planet's individual story arc. They all follow the same basic plot: Your contact asks you to scope out the shield generator, then tells you that they and their allies don't have enough resources to mount an assault. You are prompted to hand in five resource crates of the type you get for doing heroics at max level, and then the attack can begin. Destroying the shield generator is trivial, and afterwards you are asked to destroy the Star Fortress in heroic mode. (You cannot start the heroic mode for any planet until you complete this part.) If you succeed, your planetary contact joins you as a permanent companion.

While the plot is very basic, what makes the story interesting are the interactions with your would-be companions. They are all gibberish-speaking aliens, presumably to save on voice acting, but many of them are given vibrant personalities and some very interesting conversation options. For example my Jedi knight was given the option to talk about her missing companions while chatting with Choza Raabat, the Ithorian Jedi who serves as your contact on Alderaan. (Though no, he didn't know anything about Lord Scourge's whereabouts either.)

Conclusion

That the Star Fortresses are labelled as flashpoints is a bit baffling and makes one wonder whether Bioware is trying to go into a new direction with this content type. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when they came up with this... The fact that the solo mode seems to be the default and that the heroic mode is soloable as well initially gives the impression that this is meant to be a challenge that's primarily meant to be tackled alone. On the other hand the final boss on heroic is significantly easier in a group and well worth grouping up for, being more reminiscent in difficulty of the way heroic missions used to be. Also, the actual story arc can only be completed by doing all the heroic modes.

With all that said, the Star Fortress flashpoint occupies a strange place in the game, unlike any of the regular flashpoints. Locking access behind the first nine chapters of KotFE makes it quite hard to get into, and the lack of any sort of group finder option for it makes it even harder to get the heroic modes done if you can't or don't want to take them on alone.

It's not a good way of acquiring gear, however it's great for decoration drops and some of the better mods and enhancements can fetch a decent price on the GTN. Inside the flashpoint itself there also isn't much going on in terms of story or interesting mechanics (except for the heroic end boss), which makes them kind of grindy - which can be a good or a bad thing, depending on your preferences. Considering its story focus, SWTOR doesn't offer many opportunities for the kind of "mindless grinding" gameplay where you just mow down mobs for an hour while watching television on the side, but the Star Fortresses are actually really good for that. And the extra companions are fun, if not really needed considering the deluge of companions you end up with on your way through KotFE.

Finally I wanted to note that this marks the last installment of my Flashpoint Friday series. 27 posts and nearly a full year later, I've used it to talk about all the flashpoints currently in the game. I'm quite pleased with myself for having been able to stick to my fortnightly schedule for the entire time without missing a beat even once, but I have to admit that I'm also kind of glad that it's over. While I stand by what I said in the past about a series being a great way of providing yourself with something to write about at all times, it did start to overwhelm the regular content a bit when I started running the KotFE chapter discussions as well. Also, a full year is a long time to commit yourself to writing about a very specific subject like this - I suspect I'd think twice before doing that again.

Monthly Chapters - Yay or Nay?

I think I've expressed most of my opinions on KotFE's story in my summary of chapter sixteen (and to some degree in the write-ups of previous chapters), but I still wanted to talk a bit about the chapters' monthly release schedule.

Before saying anything else, I have to give Bioware kudos for actually managing to pull it off (mostly) - only two of the seven post-launch chapters suffered some sort of delay. I honestly wasn't sure whether they were going to succeed at making this ambitious update schedule reality... because they failed at it before. (SWTOR was originally meant to have monthly updates at launch.) Or remember back when Wildstar promised large monthly updates, sixteen of which were already supposed to be in pre-production before the game had even launched? The only example of an MMO successfully sticking to a really fast update schedule in recent years that I can think of is Guild Wars 2's first living story, but considering that they haven't repeated that after the first season came to a close, it probably wasn't completely without issues either.

So while it's fun to joke about things like Bioware endlessly delaying the Eternal Championship until its final release, they did a good job at sticking to their update schedule with the actual story chapters. Personally I thought it was also evident that they learned a lot from the process as they went along. At least from my experience, later chapters suffered from a lot fewer glaring bugs than some of the earlier ones (naked cat-man, anyone?), and there were marked improvements to gameplay as well as time went on. You could tell that Bioware took our feedback seriously and made a clear effort to move away from too many boring trash fights towards more engaging boss encounters.

From a storytelling point of view, I'm not entirely convinced whether monthly chapters are a good thing though. If you want people to treat it like a television show, a month between episodes is actually a bit long, and you end up constantly wanting to remind the viewer/player of what's going on - which is why I've been joking about so many chapter intro screens starting with a view of the Alliance base to remind us where we were. This results in somewhat choppy storytelling, with every chapter trying to tell an almost completely self-contained story, and I think that chapters ten to sixteen turned out to be a lot less "elegant" than chapters one to nine for that reason. I suspect that the story flow would be somewhat improved if at least two chapters at a time could be tied together, even if that would result in bigger breaks between each "chapter pair".

Of course the reason Bioware opted for monthly updates is that the subscription renews monthly, and you want to give people a reason to stay subscribed. I really wonder how that worked out for them. In a recent interview with the Bad Feeling Podcast, Ben Irving stated that they were very happy with KotFE in terms of metrics like engagement, but if that's true it's certainly not something most of us were able to observe. In my own guild - which is somewhat atypical I suppose, consisting mostly of raiders and all - people were already continuously subscribed regardless and the chapters had little influence on people's activity. In fact, as time went on I noticed that several people seemed to lose interest in keeping up with the chapters even though they were active in game, falling further and further behind in the story - though it might be that, like Njessi, they made an "executive decision" to let the chapters build up and then play through several of them at once.

Meanwhile, the hosts of the Bad Feeling Podcast reported that they got the impression that the monthly chapters caused overall engagement to decrease, as people just logged in once a month to play the new chapter and then logged off again. I suppose it doesn't matter as much for Bioware as long as people stay subscribed and keep buying Cartel crates, but it's less good for people who enjoy content that requires as many people as possible to be active and playing (such as flashpoints and PvP).

What are your feelings about the monthly update schedule? Did it make you play more, less, or the same as before? While it didn't affect my own play time, I certainly enjoyed getting new content that frequently... but as I said above, to be perfectly honest I suspect that slightly bigger and slower releases would be beneficial in terms of story flow. Then again, I'm one of the few who'll stay subbed anyway, regardless of how quickly the patches roll in.

KOTOR At Last

I've found that for a lot of people, whether they do or don't like SWTOR seems to depend largely on whether they feel that it is or isn't enough like the original Knights of the Old Republic games. I've always felt a bit out of my depth when people argue about this, as I never played either of the KOTOR games and have therefore always judged SWTOR purely on its own merits (and based on how much it reminds me of my favourite parts of WoW I suppose, can't deny that). People have repeatedly recommended that I give the KOTOR games a shot as they are supposedly still good and enjoyable, but my problem is that I just don't fancy playing single player games anymore, not when I have the internet at hand anyway.

However, two weeks ago an opportunity arose: I was going on holiday and knew that I was going to be away from the internet for a week. I was still going to have my tablet with me though, and guess what's available as a "mobile" game these days? So whenever I had finished my proper holiday activities for the day, I sat down in bed for a couple of hours and dove into the original KOTOR. I played for about eight hours that week and barely got off bloody Taris!

But first things first. The graphics are a bit meh by this point but still hold up alright. They just reminded me of how everyone was switching to 3D around the dawn of the millennium, even though the technology was nowhere near ready to produce anything as beautiful as the pixel graphics that were the standard at the time, which led to the bizarre situation of some sequels actually looking worse than their predecessors (Dungeon Keeper 2 comes to mind). Fortunately KOTOR already isn't too bad, though there isn't really enough variety in character models for a game with this many NPCs. All the ugly male twi'leks I've talked to sort of meld together in my head.

Something that isn't the core game's fault but the port's is that movement is a real pain on the tablet. I wish they'd made it tap to move or something. Instead you constantly have to press and drag to move your character around, which has resulted in me constantly running into environmental obstacles or getting myself boxed in. Just walking from one room to the next shouldn't be this much of a challenge.

The combat is turn-based and has been a bit boring so far. I wish there was an option to not have to confirm things by pressing the "play" button for every single round but to instead have it running non-stop and only pause when I want to actually change things up. Having to hit "play" twenty times to bash down an inanimate object such as a door or strongbox is not exactly engaging gameplay. Since there are no tool tips for anything, I'm also largely in the dark about what a lot of my special moves actually do. When is it better to power attack instead of critical attack? Maybe that information is hidden away in a menu somewhere, but it's certainly not obvious. After I suffered a couple of deaths, the game got me to at least use medpacks though.

The game starts off with your character being roused from her sleep by a guy called Trask Ulgo because you're about to miss the battle of the Endar Spire. As a SWTOR player, you're immediately in name-drop country, as everyone you meet and everything you see had either a server named after it in SWTOR (at launch anyway) or some sort of related item/clothing set released on the Cartel market. I'm not sure why people have strong feelings about the battle of the Endar Spire though. It's the freaking tutorial! Also, the cut scene at the end kind of shows the ship going "blap" in space, so it makes no sense that we find its wreck on the planet's surface in SWTOR.

Your first companion is a Republic soldier called Carth Onasi (more Cartel pack armour!) who is what I would call a typical Bioware character, always wanting to be the good guy and coming off as kind of whiny at times in the process, though I found him sort of endearing anyway.

Exploring the three levels of Taris was quite fun (except for the pain of moving around). The whole reason I spent so much time there is that I got quite caught up in talking to every NPC and doing most of the side quests. In fairness to the game though, it was never unclear to me what I'd have to work on to advance the main storyline. The only time I was briefly blocked was when I had to sneak past a rancor and couldn't figure out what to do from a mechanical point of view even though I knew what I was supposed to do in terms of logic. Turns out the pile of bones in the middle of the room counts as a container and you need to deposit the items you want the rancor to eat inside it...

Some things were familiar from SWTOR in a good way, such as the exiles in the undercity. Other times I was simply baffled by how much Bioware has been copying from itself. For example there is this side quest where you can step into a duelling ring, and guess what nickname you are given if you do so? "The Mysterious Stranger", just like in the Eternal Championship... similarly, I was quite surprised when I walked into a spunky blue twi'lek voiced by Cat Taber, voice actress of Vette, who soon became my companion. Talk about typecasting!

I also finally got to try both Pazaak and swoop racing and to be honest I have no idea what all the fuss is about/why people want to see these things in SWTOR. Pazaak is a pretty boring card game, and swoop racing is an extremely generic racing game. Though after seeing it for myself, I don't understand why Bioware has said in the past that they can't implement it in SWTOR due to lag. After all, every racer has the track to themselves and their time just gets added to the overall leaderboard...

I have to admit that finally being reunited with Bastila was pretty funny, and after that it didn't take long to escape the planet. Except! That bloody space battle with the Sith fighters. I'm not good at shooting games at the best of times, but the super awkard tablet controls (dragging to aim the gun turret, then tapping to shoot) made it nearly impossible to kill anything. What's worse is that there was no opportunity to save right beforehand, so every attempt required me to sit through the same six cut scenes and three loading screens again. Eventually I got annoyed enough that I googled for advice and found someone saying that if you spam shoot the moment the fight starts, you get a whole bunch of fighters at once that are initially positioned right in front of you. That ended up being the godsend that finally saw me through, though it was still only by a hair's breadth, as the Ebon Hawk seemed to be mere seconds away from exploding when I accidentally managed to hit the last enemy ship.

I've now started on Dantooine and am continuing my journey an hour at a time while commuting every day. It's going to be slow, but it's not like I've got many other things to do on that train...

Oh, and if you have the urge to comment about a big upcoming twist or something of the like - save yourself the effort, I've already been spoiled. Though it's remarkable that it took as long as it did for me to run into that particular spoiler, considering that the game is thirteen years old and I've been playing SWTOR for nearly five.

New Group Content Speculation

I think that most of us who have been following the game for a while are pretty used to Bioware being cagey about upcoming content. They weren't always like that... before launch they promised us the moon and then some! But we all know where that got us, so I can't blame them. I'm guessing they have very strict directives from above in regards to what they are and aren't allowed to talk about these days.

Still, the silence in regards to Knights of the Eternal Throne and what it's going to entail has been somewhat stranger than usual in my opinion. It's been over a month since it was officially announced and we still don't know anything more about it than we did back then. You can tell that we as fans are starved for information as people are even getting excited about leaked music. That isn't meant to be a disparaging remark about the music in any way - it's just that when an MMO announces a new expansion, the new music isn't exactly the first thing on my mind to get excited about. We just don't have anything else at the moment.

The continued silence about group content is particularly baffling. They know that people want it. James Ohlen has gone on record in an interview saying that "there will be "a lot of great co-op and multiplayer challenges" included in Eternal Throne. The story focus is there, similar to Fallen Empire, but they redoubled their efforts to make the expansion attractive for their loyal subscriber base as well." And in the latest producer livestream (Dulfy coverage here) they again confirmed that they are working on group content but refused to say anything about what type of group content it is.

While I can understand Bioware's fears about accidentally promising something that they then can't deliver for any reason, I would think that by this point in their development cycle a good chunk of this mysterious content must be close enough to being done that they know what's going to be ready by the time KotET launches. So why are they so afraid of committing to two new flashpoints and a new operation (or something to that effect)?

I can only imagine that the reason is that whatever it is they are working on doesn't strictly fit into any of the traditional formats and would require a more detailed explanation than they are willing to give (yet). There are actually several reasons why this would make sense. With KotFE, Bioware sent a very clear message that they were done with being like every other MMO out there in terms of the solo quest experience and that they wanted to do their own thing - whether you liked it or not, they did take a stand on that! Considering that, it wouldn't be a surprise if they also decided to approach the way they do group content from a new angle instead of relying on the classic formula of dungeons and raids.

More than a year ago I also wrote a post called Solo Flashpoints - Good or Bad Idea?, in which I explained why it seemed to me that Bioware didn't really know what they wanted flashpoints to be and why I thought that solo modes were an awkward band-aid solution for that problem. I'm not saying that anyone at Bioware actually read that post, but it's not hard to imagine someone over there asking themselves similar questions at some point.

I am, as usual, somewhat wary of changes like this. On sites like Massively OP you see a lot of people condemning the old raid model these days, but it does the job it's supposed to do! This is even truer for small group content, which I'm sure is the more popular format due to being more accessible. I don't really want Bioware to reinvent the wheel. Not to put too fine a point to it, but when they decided to change the way they delivered story in KotFE, they could at least point to a long history of doing the same thing successfully in single player games, but what sort of track record do they have of making their own type of group content? Mass Effect 3 multiplayer?

However, also as usual, I'm happy to wait and see what's to come. I'll appreciate the addition of more group content no matter what form it takes. But I do think it would be best if nobody hung all their hopes on it being a new op or flashpoint.

Dark vs. Light: Update After Eight Weeks

As another month has passed, I thought it might be time to take stock of my progress towards the DvL achievements once again. At least one commenter was already completely done with the event when I last posted, and at least two guildies have finished legendary tier as well since then. My pet tank is quite close too; he only needs to finish the crew skill achievements and wait for the Gree to come around again to kill some of their droids. For some reason he was terrified of facing the GSF achievement required for legendary tier and asked me to complete that one for him. I did, but I'm still baffled that this out of all things was such a big deal to him, especially after he power-levelled multiple alts to fifty in about eight hours per character.

My own progress hasn't been too great, but then I was away on holiday for a week and another weekend was more or less taken up completely by attending a wedding. Let's look at my progress one character at a time again:

Shilu, the Scoundrel

Nope, still haven't even started KotFE and am therefore officially still working on tier three. But at least I finished Shadow of Revan and did Ziost. I also ran some more hardmode flashpoints, though I still have plenty to go.

Shinister, the Assassin

I said last time that I was probably going to "retire" her for now, but as it turns out I still needed to spend a lot of time at least logged in on this character to max out her artifice (done) and grind diplomacy to get towards Dark V (still ongoing). This is taking foreverrr!

Zeresa, the Commando

Hit fifty, largely stopped playing her as nothing more was required for the event. Still logged her a couple of times to max out her armstech, but that's done as well now.

Corfette, the Sniper

Sniper is another advanced class that I actually never played before, simply because I love the stealth gameplay of Scoundrel/Operative way too much and didn't find Gunslinger particularly enjoyable when I tried it. Upon reading Vrykerion's detailed reviews of Imperial agent chapters two and three recently, I was overcome by an urge to replay the agent story. Despite of the many interesting choices you can make in that one, I've still only completed it once! My Cathar on the Progenitor was an attempt to give it another go but got stranded on Hoth when KotFE came out and my focus shifted back to my home on The Red Eclipse. I might still finish her story some day, but probably not any time soon.

So, despite of how (comparatively) slow I've found it to level through the class story on Shilu, I decided to go down that route again with this character - and I planned specifically to aim for the path that has you defecting to the Republic in chapter two, which is why her name is (almost) an anagram of "defector". I haven't yet made it far enough to do so though and have only just completed chapter one (they really condensed that bonus mission with the holograms on the chapter end boss's ship...).

As an interesting side effect, this character has also turned into a bit of an experiment in just how far you can get by just sticking to the class story - no side missions, no flashpoints or PvP, no nothing. Funnily enough, I'm still just about on track at the end of chapter one, even though things were supposed to be tuned in such a way that you had to do something extra. I guess exploration XP counts for more than I expected, as I do enjoy opening up the entire map of each planet and gathering mats for my crew skills in the process.

Also, being only just about the right level for my missions has reintroduced a surprising amount of challenge to the game. Without being level synced or wearing level-appropriate gear, my sniper's rifle hits like a nerf gun and it's mostly Kaliyo who kills things (I have her set to dps instead of healing). While exploring Alderaan, I also died repeatedly from mobs up to five levels higher than me dismounting me and mauling me to death. Who'd have thought that the game could still be this deadly if you only try hard enough to make it so?

Shin-dow, the Shadow

Yes, at this point I'm struggling for names too. I opted to make my event consular a Shadow, since I "only" have one of those as opposed to multiple Sages (and Sorcs). At first I was going to make her the same back-stabby spec as Shinister but then decided that for variety I should probably go Serenity instead. While this spec is supposed to be very powerful, I can't say that it seems to suit me very well. In a world in which most things die very quickly, relying on dots just isn't that much fun in my opinion. It reminds me of when I tried to level a lowbie warlock through dungeon finding back in WoW. And in PvP I just seem to suck at not dying.

As an aside, for some reason I felt really inspired by this character's looks and bought her a whole oufit from the Cartel market as well as a matching green mount and pet from the GTN. I'm not much of a fashionista, but sometimes a look just "clicks".

Shi-rah, the Mercenary

I haven't done much with this one yet, but I wanted to create another Imperial character with whom to run random flashpoints while Corfette sticks to her "class story only" levelling experiment. I got her up to level ten to be able to pick an advanced class, but otherwise she's still slumming it on Hutta. Bounty hunter is one of those classes of which I have too many alts for odd reasons, so this is actually my fourth. Like Zeresa, I specced her dps as I don't really need yet another healer. I also made her a togruta since I've barely used that unlock since purchasing it and I felt that I should probably cut down on creating even more twi'leks. (I can stop any time I want to, honest...)

Getting good-looking armour for togruta is a pain in the neck though, much more so than with twi'leks. That clipping! I eventually settled on the Mandalorian Clansman set, which I thought looked good and didn't seem to suffer any clipping issues. The whole thing cost about ten million on the GTN, so it wasn't exactly cheap. Then I put it on... and in the first cut scene I could see that a tiny bit of armour does clip through the top of the front montrals, just small enough that I didn't notice it on the preview. Sigh. I'm going to keep it anyway.

I also put a black/black dye into it since I happened to get one from Shi-rah's cantina crates. And for some reason it refused to take! It would look fine in most cut scenes but as soon as I was back in the regular game the chest piece was back to its basic gold/grey. I googled it and found people reporting issues with this armour not taking dyes properly as far as two years back - of course, what else did I expect? I was about to write off the dye too, but then I added some gloves to the outfit, which I hadn't done before, and suddenly the colour changed to what it was supposed to be. Who knows how these things work?