The original singleplayer stories have also been aggressively streamlined, removing the grind and allowing players to keep pace with the levelling curve by only playing the important story missions.
This solo-friendly attitude isn’t restricted to the new expansion either. At least until until someone called “BootyFett69” coasted past on a speeder. It is at times an almost comically singleplayer experience, with heavy use of instances and linear areas. At release, SW:TOR awkwardly straddled the line between Bioware RPG and traditional WoW style MMO, the new expansion dives right off that line and into story-driven goodness. I’m now in paragraph five of an article about an MMO and I’ve only spoken about the story, which should give you some indication of where Fallen Empire’s priorities lie. Even one of the most over-the-top villains of the series gets a surprising degree of character development. Two of your new companions are former Eternal Empire officers, and they’re still proud of their nation in a way. It would be easy to present the Eternal Empire as a simplistic ‘greater evil’ that united the two factions, but an enormous amount of time is spent on fleshing out their society. There’s even the possibility of a Sith/Jedi romance, only the Force knows how they’ll raise the children. SW:TOR always dabbled in shades of grey, a necessary part of letting us play as the baddies, but Knights of the Fallen Empire takes this to extremes by showing us Empire and Republic fighting side by side. Bioware seized on what could have been a limitation and used it as an excuse to bring a degree of nuance and moral complexity that the Star Wars universe hasn’t seen since, well, KOTOR 2. It’s a pragmatic decision, creating a single story is far easier than having one for each faction but it’s also a liberating one. While the original game featured different stories for each character class, the new expansion places everyone, regardless of affiliation, into position as the leader of a fragile alliance of old foes against the new threat. The war between the Empire and the Republic has weakened both parties to such a degree that a third party, the Eternal Empire, has managed to defeat both and seize control of the galaxy. Fallen Empire is set five years after my last visit to the SW:TOR universe.
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