In this week’s SWTOR Weekly, I’m going to examine some of my positive and negative reactions to the current state of affairs with BioWare Austin’s ever-changing Star Wars MMORPG.
Fallen Empire Strikes Back
The first nine chapters of Knights of the Fallen Empire, the third major expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic, were a literal game-changer in many ways. One of the most significant changes was the method of storytelling in a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG). SWTOR had differentiated itself from other MMO’s early on, but the difference is even more pronounced in Fallen Empire. The first set of chapters were as different in length as they were in content. Some were completely RPG/story/decision making, while some were long tromps through swamps, ultimately culminating in an epic showdown that gave us another huge plot twist. The question going forward is whether or not BioWare Austin will be able to keep up the pace and quality of this level of storytelling.
Chapters one through eight do not stop moving and you feel like every decision counts as you’re propelled, first, away from your captors, then, later, back into the fire. Chapter nine decidedly slows down. You get a chance to breathe and the action returns to a quest-focused, open-universe game; in other words, that’s when it becomes an MMO again. That’s not to say that it’s bad, but I did not feel the need to push as hard, as quickly, and for so many hours once I got back to the open-universe portion.
I don’t want it to sound as though there is nothing to do in the open exploration segments of Fallen Empire. Rather, chapter nine seemed, to me, at least, like it was clearly meant to fill time until chapter ten arrived. There are quite a lot of missions and sub-objectives, especially when it comes to recruiting more companions than you could ever have in the original game. That part is very interesting, especially seeing how some of the companions that are not from your chosen class’s original story interact with your Fallen Empire character.
What is frustrating is the seemingly repetitious nature of the quests of chapter nine. So far, as I haven’t finished every single quest line yet, there are multiple star fortresses to take down and a ton of collecting quests in order to recruit additional alliance members. I guess, personally, these are what I hate about MMO’s. Maybe it’s the Dungeon Master in me, but anything in an RPG that smacks of grinding irritates me. This isn’t quite the level of farming a raid that features a Darth Vader-level of villain over and over and over again, but it’s part of the same issue. Repetitive menial tasks that require hours and hours of painstaking travel with no developmental reward, that is, a reward that pushes either the story or the character forward, is neither fun nor fulfilling.
Wow, that was a lot of complaining. Actually, I think my disdain for grinding missions has been amplified by the very changes that came out of game update 4.0, namely, the massively boosted experience rewards from doing story missions versus side missions. I love how the main story missions of the original game, counting everything pre-Fallen Empire, no longer require you to spend hours and hours farming the surrounding areas of whatever planet you’re on to either a) level up or b) get better gear before you can move on and finish whichever part of the quest you’re on.
So far, chapter ten has been everything I could have asked for in a follow-up to the incredible ending of chapter eight and the start of chapter nine. I’m even more excited for chapter eleven, as it features the very first companion I ever picked up on my main character, my Trooper-Commando (Medic), back in December 2011, Aric Jorgan. As I also haven’t finished the main stories for all the classes from the original game, I’m happily anticipating starting the others, but most especially the Imperial Agent, as chapter ten’s story was penned, primarily, by Alexander Freed, who wrote the Agent’s story, as well as the recently released Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company. Freed tends to focus more on non-Force using characters, which is a great relief as that’s all we seem to get most of the time. The Agent, as well as the other non-Force users, always had much more interesting stories and characters than the Jedi and Sith in the original game.
The most interesting part of Fallen Empire, for me, is not even the great story, but how much I’m looking forward to getting my main character to that point of the game. I used my free level 60 character to play the fourth Republic class, which I hadn’t started yet: the Jedi Consular. It’s a lot of fun using a new class, but, even knowing how the story goes in chapters one through eight, I’m eager to bring my Commando into that portion of the game, once he finishes the Rise of the Emperor content.
In the end, my hope is this: that the story missions of SWTOR: Fallen Empire will continue to be of such high quality that I feel compelled to keep playing to see what happens next. For years, LITERALLY YEARS, Leo and I have said that SWTOR’s greatest asset is its story and that expanding the class stories is what the game needed to keep us. For a lot of other people, it wasn’t the story, but the typical MMO mechanics, like end-game raiding and PvP. Well, we asked for story. We got it. I hope it stays for a long time.