In my last post, I talked at length about my favourite individual story update from each expansion. While I discussed certain patches which launched an expansion, none featured in the list itself, with each expansion instead being represented by an update that came out during their lifespans.
For the most part, this is because I tend to find a lot of expansion patches themselves relatively lacklustre, at least in terms of story content. A few of them have brought in changes to game systems that I really like, and some I do enjoy the story of, but thus far no single expansion has provided both a story I really enjoyed and really great new or updated features and the like in one package.
Once again, this post will be completely ignoring the version of the game that launched with 1.0. The sheer breadth of content that came with the released game, while lacking in endgame, is quite simply unparalleled when it comes to the rest of SWTOR's story content. It's thus unfair to really include it in the same category, as that launch content still holds up really well; far better, in fact, than several storylines that we've seen come out throughout the years.
On with the show!
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#1: Rise of the Hutt Cartel
As a complete package, the 2.0 patch-cycle is still my favourite. There was just so much of everything released in a decent amount of time; Galactic Starfighter, strongholds, three new operations, two new daily zones, six new flashpoints and a new casual-friendly flashpoint mode, the revised Ranked PvP feature, and so on. Really, the only thing that felt it was lacking somewhat was warzone content, as 2.0 only introduced a new huttball arena, but to be fair SWTOR has never really been great at producing new PvP arenas of any kind.
2.0 itself had quite a muted launch in terms of new features. It brought with it the achievements system, which was good, but that was pretty much it really. It helped that a lot of 1.0's patches had introduced some very welcome quality-of-life features, so 2.0 itself could afford to spend less time on that and more on its actual content, with 2.1 soon providing dyes, the appearance designer, and the long-awaited cathar species.
2.0's storyline took us to Makeb to deal with the Hutt Cartel, and tried its best to replicate SWTOR's original philosophy with both factions having their own distinct parts to play that presented a complete picture when aligned against one another. While Makeb itself was quite painful to level through, particularly once one reached the Cartel Mining Mesa location, its story stands strong as a really good example of what the SWTOR story team were capable of doing, and it's a shame that even with 6.0 and 7.0 both having their own faction-differentiating stories we are likely never to see another Makeb-style story.
Ah well.
In terms of group content, 2.0 brought in one new operation, Scum and Villainy, and bumped up Terror From Beyond to level 55 to provide players with more things to do than just beat up Styrak. It also took four base-game flashpoints (Athiss, Cademimu, Hammer Station, and Mandalorian Raiders) and gave them level-55 hard modes, which was very welcome given that it wouldn't be until 2.3 that we got the Czerka flashpoints.
There were also two galaxy-sprawling quest chains in the form of the macrobinocular and seeker droid quests, with the former also bringing in treasure-hunting for rare items such as outfit pieces and speeder components. These are both decent storylines, with the seeker droid questline continuing the Dread Masters storyline and introducing Imperial players to Darth Acina before she became Sith Empress, and the macrobinocular questline introducing The Shroud to both factions. Jedi Master Cedral Gend, meanwhile, has not been seen since.
The thing I liked least about 2.0 was the Makeb staged weekly questline, something which I'm very glad has not been repeated since. I quite like my daily zones to have a rigidity to them, so you can formulate a good route to complete missions in a way you enjoy, and weeklies like Makeb's thus don't end up being enjoyable to me. Fortunately, Makeb proved to be something of an oddity, with future daily zones (with the exception of Iokath) returning to providing some form of consistency.
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#2: Onslaught
While I highlighted 6.2 as my favourite story update from the 6.0-era, I realised after posting it that I could almost have considered 6.0 itself for the position. As mentioned above it provided the first properly faction-differentiating story in an expansion launch since 2.0, it provided a phenomenal revision to a crud system from the previous expansion, and it really went all-out with making gearing alts incredibly easy.
So what wasn't to like?
Well... let's start with the story. On the surface, it all seems fine, as the Republic story on Onderon starts after the Imperial version, with the latter filling in gaps for the former, which would have been perfect if it had just stopped there. However, 6.0, unlike 5.10 before it, really began leaning heavily into the game's story now being set in an alternate timeline depending on which faction your character is a part of. 5.10 worked very well in this regard, as I remember a lot of people interpreting the final choice for Imperial players about Gnost-Dural's fate not mattering as Republic characters clearly come and rescue him come-what-may.
If only...
6.0 did away with any notion of the two factions' stories aligning, as not only can Imperial players help King Petryph succeed in his attack on the city of Iziz and destroy the Republic fleet, but they can also kill Petryph and Senator Deja Nebet, both of whom would feature in the Republic version as well. So, categorically, an Imperial perspective could render a Republic playthrough impossible.
I also have to say that, looking back, I am disappointed that certain characters haven't really appeared since despite 6.0 setting them up as big players. Supreme Chancellor Galena Rans appeared at last, but disappeared soon after. The new Dark Council has only been represented post-update by Darth Krovos, Darth Xarion, and Darth Norok (depending on your choices), and 6.0 itself would potentially remove up to four Dark Council members from appearing in future content.
Darth Savik can be killed by saboteur characters when Malgus chokes her for letting the Republic fleet escape, Darth Anathel can be killed by an Inquisitor for stealing their seat, and Darth Vowrawn and Darth Shaar can be killed by Lana on the Commander's orders for letting their personal ambitions grow too great on Mek-Sha. In this latter case, even when Darth Vowrawn is the Councillor, not Shaar, Shaar still gets removed from play by being killed alongside him.
I have a shedton of respect for the amount of options the writing team are able to flag up in subsequent updates, but I do believe they are making things much, much harder for themselves with all this variance. It's why we've never seen a "State of the Galaxy" update since 5.10, as Charles Boyd himself acknowledged that it would be impossible to provide an objective look at things with how many different and significant choices players can make now!
Uggggh.
Storyline aside, I feel 6.0 itself was a reasonably solid expansion patch. Galactic Renown improved on Galactic Command in many ways, although I missed the additional rewards you could get from Command crates, and the Nature of Progress operation was decent. This patch also brought in level-scaling for older content, with everything bar Nature of Progress and 6.0's first flashpoint Objective Meridian being locked at level 70, but that was okay at the time because Veteran's Edge still made it so that improving your gear still resulted in better performance in scaled content.
That is, until it was removed from master mode operations with no prior warning in a later patch. Sigh.
Crafting also turned into an absolute nightmare with the sheer number of materials you had to farm. The silly thing is, BioWare prided themselves on making crafting relevant for endgame for everyone, and yet it was just infinitely faster to farm gear by running flashpoints and operations than it was to craft. It was just such a palaver, and I really hope when crafting is eventually updated in the current game, whether it be in 7.0 or 8.0, that they return it to a more straightforward process.
While I wasn't a huge fan of the story on either location, Onderon and Mek-Sha were decent additions to the game. I really love Onderon's aesthetics in particular, and it has since become another daily zone I like to revisit every once in a while. I'm still a bit peeved Republic players can't fully explore Mek-Sha properly as one zone is locked behind an Imperial heroic phase, though...
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#3: Shadow of Revan
Shadow of Revan launched as a horrifically buggy mess, preventing the main story from being completed unless you were very lucky as I was and it just about worked, but looking back at it I feel it does hold up reasonably well. The first impressions were rough, but now we've had time to get used to the things subsequent expansions have done they don't feel all that bad.
For example, I remember being really thrown off by side missions just having a pop-up with accompanying dialogue from the quest-giver, but at least the vast majority still had our characters speak after the fact! Compared to 4.0's KOTOR style conversations, where our characters are mute, I'll take 3.0's side quest design any day!
While the larger beats of the storyline for Shadow itself were identical across both factions, I absolutely loved the individual class story missions that BioWare were able to work in. They still hold up really well as well, and I especially loved the Jedi Knight one in particular. The wider story was alright; it just didn't work fantastically well compared to how the Forged Alliances storyline had set it up.
In terms of group content, 3.0 launched with two operations, two new flashpoints, and bumped-up hard mode versions of the Forged Alliances flashpoints. The Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice were notable for being the first "hardmare" operations, in other words an operation which had no nightmare mode, and where the hard mode itself was made harder to compensate. They're alright. I really enjoy them in story mode... not so much in what is now veteran mode.
3.0 also did away with the skill trees, replacing them with Disciplines which automatically granted certain abilities - including new abilities that replaced a pre-existing ability with spec-specific functionality - and provided a new, more flexible, way of speccing passives via Utility Points. This system lasted in this form for several patches until 7.0 replaced it with its more streamlined concept, so despite a lot of people really disliking the change it ended up having a lot of longevity.
BioWare also introduced a bunch of passive group buffs, so that every class now had something unique to bring to the table. Whenever certain abilities were used by a spec, an accompanying buff or debuff would apply to the target which would increase things like damage resistance, healing taken, or damage taken from abilities of certain types, or reduce stats like accuracy. I still really like this change.
The generic storyline mightn't have been much cop, but I still really like what 3.0 introduced in terms of features.
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#4: Legacy of the Sith
Hear me out.
Legacy of the Sith was incredibly short with its storyline, sure, but it avoided the pitfalls of 6.0's story by making both factions' stories reasonably separated. With the exception of being able to come across a captured Arn Peralun and Colonel Wen Gallo as an Imperial after completing that version of the story, neither storyline completely contradicts the other in an irreconcilable manner. The storyline that came with Manaan's daily zone did have the two factions' stories contradict one another with one character being killable or converting to serve the Empire, but that didn't come with 7.0 itself and it has no direct impact on the main story anyway.
I really did enjoy the Manaan storyline for what it was. It was nice to return and explore how the selkath felt about the Republic or how the war was driving the Imperials to mine every ounce of kolto they could. It was just a nice distraction from everything to do with Malgus and the mandalorians, and a reminder that even with the "main story" going on, this is still a galaxy at war and that cannot be brushed under a rug even with other things going on.
I'll take storylines like this any day over Keeping Up with the Valkorions.
7.0's big thing was the introduction of combat styles which, despite several grievances about a handful of abilities now being optional or removed altogether, I feel is very, very welcome. The ability to spec a trooper to be a sniper, or a Sith Warrior as an assassin, and so on just adds an extra level of variety to the game as a whole, as if somebody really loathed both of the trooper's original advanced classes, suddenly they can have their trooper be a tech spec they actually enjoy! Huzzah!
7.0 also launched with one new flashpoint and undid 6.0's scaling nightmare with everything else. Ruins of Nul was alright, although insanely difficult when it first launched. Oh, and it was bugged for a lot of people as well with the final fight! Yay...!
Real-talk, though. 7.0 was short and missing content, yes, but ultimately I cannot blame BioWare for that, nor do I believe they were lying about their intentions for what they had planned. It's fairly obvious that something somewhere went wrong. Whether they lost people to other BioWare projects, reducing their already limited manpower, or things proved far trickier to sort out than they had planned, something clearly forced their hand and they had to compromise as best they could.
That's something BioWare have never really been good at, as we saw throughout 5.0 while they were still trying to shake off the content they had hoped to tell in their original plans.
So no, I will never blame BioWare for "lying" about 7.0. It didn't work out as announced, but just because something is announced and doesn't come to pass that way doesn't make it a lie. If they'd have known it wouldn't have worked and still announced their plans, that's a different story. I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt here, especially with how much work they had to put in between 7.0 and 7.1. Something went wrong, and full credit to them, they've done their best to fix it.
However, I do have some legitimate issues with how 7.0 itself went about things. Content difficulty spiked massively, to the extent where groups who in previous expansions were able to finally start clearing content like veteran mode Scum and Villainy or Terror From Beyond now found themselves running against a brick wall.
While 7.0's gearing inherited the alt-friendly nature of 6.0's "get one character to x gear-rating, and items of that gear-rating will drop if possible" system, getting to those gear-ratings the first time was an absolute slog and it's only with recent patches that the limits on item-rating depending on difficulty have been lifted outside of 338+ gear. 7.3 finally made it so that you no longer needed to do dailies to upgrade ops or PvP gear and could actually upgrade it just by completing the relevant activities.
In general, they seemed to treat 7.0 as "the grinding patch", as they had seen that people were happy to grind in 6.0 and designed their new systems to be the next evolution of that. Here's the thing, though; grinding in 6.0 was universal. No matter what you did, you would eventually get to getting 306-rating drops. 7.0 taking this concept and adding the extra layers to it in terms of there being virtually no mix-and-match between gear from different sources just made things too grindy.
Crafting is still in limbo, and it's not clear yet how BioWare will go about adding new updates, or even when. Even if they do, they may actually face some pushback now from the elite players who cleared the hardest content with 6.0-era augments about how 7.0-era augments will make things "too easy", because apparently even the slightest of change will make things "too easy" for certain people.
I also have to say that I do find myself kinda missing Galactic Renown. Having an eternal levelling bar just added a certain je ne sais quoi to the whole thing, although I do acknowledge that with how 7.0's gearing system was designed Renown wouldn't have worked at all well. Still, its absence is noticeable, and testament to how much they improved upon Galactic Command.
The thing is, I can't really classify 7.0 as a bad expansion patch. The combat styles functionality is wonderful, and shakes up every aspect of the game's content in a new and welcome way due to the new variations one can get. Grinding gear was a pain, but it was still designed with some degree of alt-friendliness in mind. There are definitely things that feel like they don't work, but it's hard to know how much of them are because of 7.0 or because of adjustments made because of how people played 6.0.
For example, the biggest issue to me that came with 7.0 itself was the content difficulty spike. It felt like BioWare had seen the armies of powertechs and marauders in high-end content throughout 6.0 (even if just because the difficulty of the content all but required it) and just went "okay, so all teams clearing master mode raids are running with these specs!" and made it so that when they scaled the content up, it really benefited from having these classes present. Certainly, R-4 Anomaly released with boss fights that required mobility, high defensive potential, and solid offensive output.
So is that a 7.0 issue, or a follow-on issue from 6.0 that happens to be a part of 7.0? I have no qualms about decrying the difficulty spike, as I feel it is a terrible part of this expansion, but I also don't blame BioWare for looking at the metrics from the previous expansion and potentially scaling everything around them. Never mind the fact that certain boss fights like Hateful Entity were and still are only doable with powertechs, powertechs, and powertechs...
As much as I was disappointed R-4 got delayed, I think on reflection had it actually launched with 7.0 it would have dragged 7.0 down on this list if it had come in as difficult as it ended up being. I really do not understand how the developers believe that thing is a group-finder difficulty operation...
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#5: Knights of the Fallen Empire
When discussing a couple of these expansion patches, I've made it clear that just because I consider an update's story lacklustre doesn't mean it can't still be salvaged by good new features if I really like them. Knights of the Fallen Empire should logically follow in that same vein if I were being truly objective. However...
It's hard to be positive about the story that began with 4.0. I'll start with the chapters as a story element. For the first time through, they worked fine. They were beautifully animated in terms of cutscenes, the characters you got to meet were good fun, and they felt like SWTOR was really taking advantage of the new films to revitalise its image and go all-out for providing solid story content. That was great to see.
Once.
One thing I have always admired about SWTOR compared to other big MMOs is that it actively encourages you to create and use alt characters. You can just play one, sure, but you'll only get a complete picture of everything if you have at least one from each origin story, as all class stories provide a good amount of backbone to the game and as mentioned Makeb's story is only complete when you put both Imperial and Republic perspectives together.
Knights of the Fallen Empire is a tedious slog to revisit, not helped by the fact that the chapters just keep on starting one after the other. That was fine as a gimmick for the first nine, and it wasn't noticeable for subsequent ones as long as you played them when they first released, but coming back to it... yeah, I loathe how it just keeps on pushing you forward rather than allowing you to take a break. I'm trying hard to keep this to 4.0 itself, but since all chapters, even 5.0's, use the auto-play function that 4.0 introduced I feel it is fair to use it as ammunition in this context.
I'm so pleased we saw the back of that when 5.0's story ended after only (hah!) twenty-five chapters. Can you imagine getting a fresh character through up to forty-eight chapters, each forcing you to sit through a loading screen and / or back out of the next one's first cutscene whenever you felt like a break?
More than this, though, if it weren't for 4.0 completely and utterly nullifying all playable characters save for the one you yourself are playing, we wouldn't be in the situation we are now with alternate timelines. Granted, the storyline of 4.0 as an expansion didn't really go too far with this, as it kept things mostly self-contained in terms of always dealing with Zakuul, so most of my frustrations in this regard is now being directed at patches 5.2 and 6.0 in particular.
Still, 4.0 set the stage for what would follow and I can't quite let that go. It's just such a big issue with the game's story nowadays, and I wish there was a way to somehow undo it all and start anew.
It's a shame, really, because I really do like a number of the concepts behind Zakuul. I like the pantheon of gods, I kinda like the isolationist nature of its people in terms of being kept unaware about the wider galaxy. Characters like Senya and, yes, Koth are characters I quite enjoy being around. I just... didn't really like how much it tried to railroad us into caring about this new empire and stopping it, when all I wanted was to go back to the Republic and try to fix things there rather than create some stupidly powerful Alliance.
Oh, and 4.0 launched with no new operations or flashpoints, with the closest equivalents being the Star Fortresses. I loved the level-scaling meaning that rather than up to six flashpoints being relevant there were suddenly at least twenty, but in terms of actual new stuff... yeah, the Star Fortresses were incredibly disappointing and, again, tedious to repeat on subsequent characters.
Added to which, this expansion launched with something called "High-Priority Target Hard Modes". This was a process whereby each week a specific hard mode operation would be selected, and that operation would drop the highest rating gear in the game. Awesome, right? Well... it came at a cost. See, during this time nightmare raids themselves would drop no loot, so while this system was fantastic for more casual groups as it meant they could gear up with NiM gear in advance, your progression team would get nothing for setting foot into NiM itself. This would be fixed a couple of patches later.
Sigh.
I know that this being below 7.0 will likely raise a few eyebrows, especially with how casual-friendly 4.0's wider changes were in comparison to several of 7.0's, but honestly 7.0 has a major advantage over 4.0 as far as I'm concerned; its story was simply more of what I wanted to see. 4.0 really did a number on SWTOR's story prospects, and we're still feeling its effects all these years later even now we've completely moved on from everything released in this expansion, and even with a bit of guff here and there I'll gladly leap upon anything which is more of interest to me than otherwise.
I'm sorry, but I have to be biased here. I loathed repeating Fallen Empire's launch (and future) content on additional characters, yet I didn't mind repeating Legacy of the Sith's launch content because of that greater variance. I may have issues with the story as it is now, but the issues there are wider than anything 7.0 itself did, and many of them have roots in how 4.0 tore up the foundations.
Thanks, 4.0.
~
#6: Knights of the Eternal Throne
5.0 was in many ways cursed from the start. BioWare still had the rest of their story to tell, but because the majority of the playerbase loathed the chapters, they had to wrap up far, far quicker than they had intended to. As a result, the 5.0 story feels incredibly rushed. While it tries to provide satisfactory endings to characters like SCORPIO it's very noticeable that they wouldn't have wanted to tell these stories in this manner.
This would plague BioWare for the majority of the expansion, as they hadn't originally planned on providing the content they ended up having to deliver. It's hardly any wonder the uprisings just ended up being mostly repurposed environments with very little story, as they were quick and easy to produce. Meanwhile, the first operation since 3.0 wouldn't be announced until 5.2 and even then that was released bit-by-bit with master mode being in limbo until right at the very end.
All that aside, let's look at 5.0 itself.
There... really isn't a lot that's positive about this expansion in its earliest form. The story was okay, if only because it was nice to finally see the back of Valkorion. The second chapter in particular is incredibly frustrating story-wise, as Acina proves to be a complete idiot in taking us out with no reinforcements accompanying us. She's the Sith Empress for goodness' sakes! Otherwise, I don't feel any chapter comes close to matching any within my top five for Fallen Empire. They're... fine. Nothing special.
Gearing was relegated solely to the brand-new Galactic Command system, an endless-levelling system which would grant a crate when a level was reached, and that crate would contain a random gear-piece of a random quality. If I remember correctly, it was originally intended that the crate would have a chance of containing another class's set gear before it was mercifully changed to just being relevant to you.
Okay, so I have no qualms about using a character to get gear for another, but it shouldn't come at the cost of not getting gear for the character you're using. That just defeats the point.
There was simply no loot otherwise. No flashpoint loot, no uprising loot, no warzone loot, no operation loot... you get the picture. This was also the first expansion that saw the removal of Expertise, thus making PvE and PvP gear the same for all intents and purposes. Sure, it meant that everyone was in the same boat, but it was one heck of a rocky boat!
Sure, things improved, but it was not a pleasant time to be playing. RNG with no ability to counteract it, like being able to buy an item you were still missing, is always deeply unpleasant, and for a time that's what we had to contend with. It would have been fine if there were alternatives, like being able to buy a PvP version of relics of a certain type, like you could even in 7.0 to keep you going until you got your coveted raiding version or whatever, but no, gearing in 5.0 started out as just RNG.
The uprisings ultimately ended up being quite forgettable, and that's largely because they lacked a lot of what made flashpoints really interesting. There wasn't a lot of setup behind what was going on, and ultimately we still don't know how they factor into the grand plans of 5.0's big bad, if indeed they're actually meant to!
As mentioned in 7.0's blurb, I do have a lot of sympathy for the developers whenever things clearly go wrong and they have to make compromises. They ended up covering a lot of ground in the almost three years that 5.0 went on for, and it's clear to me that they were making up for 4.0's lack of content in this regard. Indeed, they even added updates to GSF in patch 5.5, including the first new map since patch 2.6!
Ultimately, everything good they subsequently did unfortunately leaves 5.0 itself looking really quite sorrowful in comparison. It's a shame they had to make compromises, and I'm pleased they were eventually able to recover. Were I rating these expansions in their entirety rather than just the patch that launched them, 5.0 would just manage to climb above 4.0 for its efforts to redeem itself. Unfortunately, I am not looking at the expansions in this manner.
Oh well.
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Conclusion
I acknowledge that I have quite a lot of biases negatively impacting how I feel about certain expansion patches. I know a lot of people genuinely do love Fallen Empire and its content, but honestly I feel no love for it whatsoever. Sure, level-scaling was great, and easily the best feature the game had ever seen added prior to combat styles, but I just cannot bring myself to forgive 4.0 for doing what it did with the story.
5.0 showed us that an expansion that has a very rough start can recover and ultimately lead to great things, just as 6.0 showed us that just because a feature was terrible in one expansion doesn't mean it can't be made better. I feel a lot of that reflects in how 7.0's launch content and systems are evolving, and honestly I am very much hopeful that 8.0 manages to pull what 6.0 did after 5.0 in terms of community feeling.
That's out of my hands, of course, and I am very interested to see what the team is capable of doing now they are hopefully no longer at risk of losing people to other BioWare projects. We shall see what we shall see.
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