Is KotFE Keeping You Engaged?

In over four years of playing I've had my fair amount of ups and downs with SWTOR. When Bioware announced the first server merges I hated how they were handling the whole thing, and I loathed it when they originally announced the free-to-play conversion. Then there was the time my first guild died a slow death, or when my current guild had a reorganisation that left me out in the cold for a while. And of course there've always been periods where I got a bit bored of the game and focused on playing something else for a while. That's not really a problem per se, but a normal part of being an MMO player I think.

Still, I seem to be entering another one of these phases and I'm feeling oddly conflicted about it. I wasn't even sure if I should write about it at all, because sometimes not thinking about something actually does work and lets you brush it off more easily, but I've decided that this isn't one of these cases and that it's more likely to be the opposite - that I'll feel better after having gotten it off my chest.

Basically, I think it's KotFE. I still think that the story is great and all that, but, well... while I didn't think very highly of the people who loudly announced that they were going to rage-quit the moment Bioware revealed that they weren't going to release any new group content in the near future, I can sort of feel the effects of that design decision slowly creeping up on me by now, and on my guild as well. We still run operations every week, and I enjoy the variety, but nonetheless... It's been over a year since we last got a new operation and we still don't have an ETA for the next one. It does get a bit boring and it's noticeable that several guildies have been losing their lustre and aren't as interested in running ops anymore, not to even mention doing anything outside of ops nights.

I'm kind of joining their ranks to be honest (I probably spend more time writing about the game than actually playing it right now), but as I said above, I feel oddly conflicted about it. Part of me really wants to replay the KotFE story a couple more times. While being more attentive to every little detail for my Chapter by Chapter series, I've noticed all kinds of interesting tidbits that I missed the first two times around. (For example, look at the crowds to whom Arcann announces the Outlander's crimes at the end of chapter one and you'll spot some familiar faces.) And just how many times have I thought or said that I really need to get my agent into the new content so I can see what chapter seven and ten are like (which are particularly relevant to agents)? Yet every time I log on, I think of all the other chapters that I'll have to go through first... and then log off again.

I have one guildie who has completed KotFE and even the associated Alliance grind something like eight times or more and seems to have loved it, but I just... can't. It reminds me of this post I wrote literally just before the KotFE announcement about how all the new story stuff they'd released up to then was nice, but it's not fun to play through the exact same arc over and over again within a short period of time, especially alone. KotFE definitely suffers from the same problem, even if the devs tried to spice it up with class-specific bits of dialogue here and there.

The whole situation also reminds me of my relationship with Dragon Age: Origins, which was my first Bioware game and had a huge effect on me. After my first playthrough I found out that there was quite a bit of variety in the way things could pan out near the end, depending on your choices, and I kind of wanted to see them all, but I never actually managed to complete a second playthrough. I rolled up half a dozen alts to see all the different origin stories, but most of these characters didn't even make it past Ostagar (the first zone after the introduction). The few that did eventually pass that milestone then went off to die (figuratively) in the Deep Roads, a long zone full of tedious trash fights that just didn't seem worth the bother to me.

I suppose you could ask why it matters - if I'm happy to sub for one new chapter a month, I could just play that and then do something else the rest of the time, right? And it's true. But it just doesn't sit right with me that my "home MMO" should feel like there is nothing for me to do (that I want to do and that's also worth repeating), and as I said, part of me does want to tackle those additional story playthroughs. I just can't make up my mind whether the associated downsides are worth it or not.

Are you happy to re-play KotFE's chapters on all of your alts? If not, what else do you do to keep yourself entertained?

SWTOR's Unique Appeal

In the past couple of days I've found myself thinking about what makes SWTOR so appealing to me, as I frequently struggle to explain it to people. Many features that I like about it are available in similar or equal quantity and quality in other games. While it matters that the general flavour of the game, the setting and character design appeal to me big time, that's not all there is to it. Saying that I like the voice acting is also true, but rings kind of hollow as far as explanations go.

The conclusion I eventually came to is that it probably all goes back to Dragon Age. As someone who only buys very few video games (one or two a year really), I'd never played any Bioware games before Dragon Age: Origins. It was my first ever single player RPG as well and as such left a very big impression on me. I loved how the interactions with the NPCs made the world come alive and how the different choices I got to make made me feel like I was actually roleplaying.

The only thing that made me sad was that it all had to end. There was replayability there alright - I was amazed when I found out about the many different permutations of the ending, depending on your character's sex and origin, and how you treated Alistair, Anora and Loghain - but it was lonely. I could share the details of my adventures with others on forums and in conversation, but in game our characters were forever trapped in their own alternate universes.

Also, combat kind of sucked. It's not that I ever hated it, but every time I went for another playthrough, my enthusiasm eventually fizzled out during one of the dungeon crawl sections, as killing darkspawn just felt like a tedious hurdle that I had to overcome in order to get to the next "interesting" bit (i.e. conversation / character development). I never managed to actually complete a second full playthrough of the first game for this reason. Dragon Age 2's combat may have been ridiculously easy and button mashy, but at least it allowed me to get to the bits that I liked more quickly and easily, and I actually did complete that one more than once.

Still, both games left me longing for some sort of multiplayer version of the experience, and preferably one without the tedious combat. Enter SWTOR!

Okay, so it's set in a completely different universe, but that's okay because it's another IP that I'm quite fond of. But otherwise it's all there, the stories and the memorable characters that make the world come alive. And this time, it's all happening a shared world, where once my characters are done with their private business, they can step out into the space station and embrace their friends. Combat? Pretty much copy and pasted from Burning Crusade era WoW, a.k.a. a sort of day-to-day gameplay that I liked for its own sake.

I never really thought about it like this before, but SWTOR basically filled a niche that I was actively longing for, and it filled it perfectly, not to mention at a good time (when I was growing really tired of WoW and the direction it was taking). I think I'd have a hard time going back to a more traditional MMO now.