There were some original add-ons after the class stories; a continuation of the faction story, at least, with some class specific dialogue. I was actually surprised to learn that the original plan was to continue the class stories in the expansions, but when EA cut staffing and left a bunch of bean-counting yes-men (not my term and I'm hearing that second hand if not even... more hands than that, but it sounds eminently believable) it didn't happen. The original stuff that was added was actually in many ways a foreshadowing of the daily area, reputation stuff and group content that there is now a lot of. This includes the Ilum stuff (a beautiful planet, with a fascinating night sky view) which ends on back to back story flashpoints, the Black Hole; a special separate area on Corellia that serves as a weird kind of coda to the stories on that planet. The former is a must-do, but the Black Hole is skippable if you're not interested, and you won't miss much.
There's some other stuff too; Section X, which you need to be subscribed to access (or buy access on the cartel market—a weird experiment, which luckily they didn't try again) along with the seeker droid and macrobinocular missions start off a fascinating sub-story about the Dread Masters, which of course we know from most of the stories on Belsavis, or at least the faction stories. This goes on and on with several little chapters that pop in, but which sadly ends in a series of operations, so solo players will not be able to finish it. There are, however, reputation tracks and unlocks available along this, including for Section X itself, and the follow-up for it on Oricon, the "horror planet" where the Dread Masters showdown takes place (in back to back operations.) It's too bad because the ambiance on Oricon is one of the best, but you have an ongoing cliffhanger, sadly.
This is true for some of the other stuff that starts at this stage too. The Seeker Droid and Macrobinocular quests are quite long, and varied, and kind of interesting, but you can't quite finish them when you get right down to it, unless you do grouping. And finding a group that's still going to do those really old quests is easier said than done. I actually tried to for a while, in spite of my aversion to grouping, but couldn't ever find anyone interested. There's a Czerka planet, CZ-198, which is also pretty interesting, but it also ends on two back to back flashpoints that are not soloable. (I tried. Maybe I'm just not good enough, but it doesn't seem reasonable to play these without a group.) So, you can get introduced to the concept, and go do some dailies on the planet, get some Reputation and buy some interesting unique gear.
There were some other interesting expansions, like Galactic Starfighter and Galactic Strongholds, which are just asides for collectors, in my experience. But the first expansion, and certainly the first "real" expansion, is Rise of the Hutt Cartel, which offers faction story expansion, with some class specific dialogue here and there. It offers a significant story element, as well as a reputation track, and a quite large new planet to explore; quite a bit larger than Oricon or CZ-198, or Ilum, for instance.
However, all of these lack the depth, length and focus of the class stories, which are obviously significantly more meaty. This is especially true of the second and third smaller expansions, starfighter and strongholds, which only add "asides" to do. However, with the fourth expansion, Shadow of Revan, the "main" story really gets started again in a big way. Shadow of Revan includes four back to back (to back to back) soloable flashpoints, with accompanying cut scenes, and three planets (albeit one of them is quite small.) These include the pirate planet of Rishi, Yavin IV and Ziost. All three of them have reputation tracks and dailies. These planets are mostly pretty fun, especially Rishi, which is one of my favorite planets in the game. Rishi also has a class specific small quest for each class; the last time something like that was done. Otherwise, all classes go through the same story, although there are some faction specific stuff. It's clear that the developers basically expect you to play these expansions with a Jedi Knight, or maybe a Sith Warrior, and everyone else fits a little less well.
The flashpoints are also quite interesting; there are invasions of Korriban and Tython, and depending on your faction, you do them differently (needless to say.) Rakata Prime and Manaan, both from Knights of the Old Republic, also make reappearances in the flashpoints. Although the end of the Jedi Knight story is that he kills the Emperor, it turns out that it didn't "take" and he managed to survive his death (much like Sidious, by coincidence, although here it's not nearly as badly and confusedly executed as the sequel trilogy.
There are two big expansions which follow and which kind of serve as back to back parts of the same long story arc. This is Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne. It turns out that the Emperor has, for decades, been living a secret "bigamist" life, as another guy entirely who's also the emperor of Zakuul, a planet lost somewhere out there in the galaxy. However, he's got this crazy fleet of robot starships under his control, as well as his own order of force-using Jedi/Sith analog knights, and he sends his twin sons out to go conquer the galaxy. Which they do, pretty effectively—their force knights and their "Eternal Fleet" basically bring both the Sith Empire and the Republic to their knees. Your own character, along with Darth Marr, ends up going to face this Emperor and recognizes him as the Sith Emperor in a different body. But one of the Emperor's sons kills the Emperor, kills Darth Marr, makes you the scapegoat, and freezes you in carbonite for five years. The next thing you know, some of the characters you know from Shadow of Revan are rescuing you. You find out that the emperor still lives after being killed again, but as a disembodied entity in your head. You've lost all of your companions, but you get new ones, and gradually are able to re-recruit most of your past companions (as well as past companions for many other classes from your faction in particular, but occasionally from others.)
Anyway, you end up becoming the leader of yet a "fourth" super power in the galaxy, the Alliance for the overthrow of Zakuul, with a group made up of Imperial, Republic and criminal elements all out to overthrow the current rulers of the galaxy. This is quite a good story, actually, although it makes the most sense if you play it as a Jedi Knight in my opinion, and because it's exactly the same (for these two expansions anyway) there's not a lot of reason to play it with all of your classes. When its done, the Emperor is dead yet again, your Alliance is in possession of the Eternal Fleet, for a while until that goes caput, and you end up having to pick a side; Republic or Imperial again. This paves the way for more "traditional" Republic/Imperial factions and rivalries going forward.
Both of these expansions play a bit differently than the game had done until this point. You move from chapter to chapter, and each chapter is more like a flashpoint that you play solo than like traditional planetary missions. There are a lot of planets that appear in these chapters, but they aren't open planets that you can go and explore in a traditional sense.
The next expansion, which is for a little bit longer, the current expansion is Onslaught, works a bit more traditionally. There are a few story missions on small planets, which you can then go back and do dailies on for reputation. There aren't any class stories anymore, but there are faction stories (which; again, seem to assume that you're either a Jedi Knight doing the Republic faction or a Sith Warrior doing the Imperial faction. Anyone else can do them, but they make a little bit less sense and feel much more forced.) There's a final coda to the story of the Emperor, before he's well and fully purged from the galaxy for good for good. You get a fairly detailed biography of him as it goes on, and the three personas that he had. Tenebrae is his original form, where he was "the black-eyed Sith lord", and a member of the Sith Pureblood race. Vitiate is his form known from the original class stories, where he is a human Sith Emperor who looks and acts very much like Sidious/Palpatine from the Star Wars movies. But they talk all through the class stories about how he was often missing in action and hadn't been involved with the Empire in a regular way, if at all, for years. This is because of his third persona, Valkorian, where he was the human emperor of what became the Zakuul Empire, which briefly conquered both the Republic and the Sith Empire.
It's interesting because of the obvious parallels with what Jew Jew Binks (as E;R calls Jar Jar Abrams—see my last post) tried to do with Sidious in Rise of Skywalker, because the ideas are very similar, but one is well developed and reasonably well executed, and one is a slap-dash, obviously thrown together afterthought done for poor reasons and extremely poorly executed. If you're interested in getting the total view of the Emperor's biography, there are some YouTube biographies of him out there here and there, and of course you can read a lengthy discourse about him on Wookiepedia.
Anyway, as I said, with Onslaught on, we get back to more simple stories; the Empire vs the Republic, small story updates on small planets, and the addition of a flashpoint and operation here and there. All of these new smaller planets have a reputation track and dailies, and special gear that can be unlocked via the reputation system. We get planets like Iokath, Ossus, Mek-Sha, and Onderon. Dantooine makes an appearance as a flashpoint, where we get to explore deja vu style the ruins of the Jedi Enclave from Knights of the Old Republic in an area that's separate from the Dantooine that you see with the pirate event and the swoop bikes event.
Without the Emperor, the threats are more realistic but less focused and obvious. They've tried to use Darth Malgus (the bald guy from the cinematic trailers), first as a stand-in in earlier years for the Sith overall, but later as the kind of overarching bad guy who replaces the Emperor, but it's unclear if the story group for the game is up to the challenge of creating story content that's even a fraction as engaging as the original class stories, or the Valkorian arc.
The good news is that there is no reason to buy the expansions. If you subscribe, even for a single month, then you unlock all of the expansions currently available... forever. (Except for Section X. You need to be subscribed, or buy that with cartel coins, i.e., real money, to play that.)
Legacy of the Sith is the most recently announced expansion. It was supposed to launch next week, but just in the last day or two a delay of two months was announced.
Finally, and this is the last word on the Mother of All SWTOR Reviews, one of the things that I do content wise is the recurring events. About once every other month or so, each of these events comes up for a week in rotation. There are some other events that occur less frequently. Mostly, these include some special areas to explore, daily missions to do and a reputation track. Many of them give out special currencies, which can be spent with special vendors on unique items, some of which are hard to get and indicate a fair amount of effort put into getting them if you see them on someone. Some of these include minigames, like the swoop bike races for the swoop bike event, or some of the weird cooking events on the Feast of Prosperity event. Some of them are more straightforward, like the bounty missions on the bounty hunter week, or the pirate missions on the Dantooine pirates event, or most of the events in the rakghoul caverns for the rakghoul events. The Gree event is, other than swoop bikes, the most unusual of them, as while easy to earn reputation, more or less, as a solo player, its much more difficult to earn the gree currency, gray helixes, without doing either grouping or PvP stuff.
I tend to like these events, and I'm sometimes frustrated at the amount of time in between them. I've been waiting for a few weeks for the bounty hunter event to get announced, as I need some more reputation and currency for some stuff I really want to buy from the bounty hunter vendors. Of course, it was just announced as taking place while I'm out of town, so now instead of weeks, I'm going to have to wait until probably at least February and maybe even March for it to come up at a time when I can play it. Sigh.
And a very newly implemented event, or maybe event isn't quite the right word for it, is galactic seasons. It came out while I was offline, and when I came back, it was just wrapping up. The next season won't start until the expansion launches, so I can't give you much firsthand experience with it, but it's something that I'm excited to try out because it's got loads of pretty cool rewards.
But you see the trend. Reputation. Dailies. A reason to keep coming back and tinkering. That's what they offer now. The story has taken a back seat to just "wander around doing repeatable stuff."
Of course, the story's still there, it's just that there isn't much added to the story these days. Which is probably OK, I suppose, because what they are doing is no doubt easier and cheaper, and SWTOR wasn't the "WoW killer" that many fans thought it would be in advance of its launch.
Overall impression? I'm not a big video game player in general. I played quite a bit of RDR2, as my back catalog of posts might suggest. I played a lot of Street Fighter (and similar) type games. And I play the BioWare Star Wars games. That's about it. Of them, this is probably my favorite game, and one that if it's still out there, I'll probably keep coming back to for years to come.
However, it's literally celebrating it's 10th anniversary this year. The game engine and graphics weren't really top of the line when it was new; they're certainly not any more. Of course, being even older hasn't made Knights of the Old Republic less of a classic. But, I can't imagine that this will be around forever. All the more reason to record some playthroughs so I can have them archived when the game finally locks up for the last time and closes its virtual doors. It's inevitable that it will happen. Hopefully it's later rather than sooner, but we'll see.
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