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What, if anything, went wrong with KotFE/ET and what should come in the future?


LordArtemis

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I have some opinions about this, they are mine alone. Just wanted to make that clear.

 

I think the expansions were a success overall. They increased game visibility, brought in new players, and gave us some great storytelling. But, did they hold those new players, and what flaws existed that prevented the expansions from reaching their full potential?

 

I would say they had a few serious flaws that hurt their potential to hold players...

 

1) Forced encounters.

The triggers for trash mobs were all over the place. Far too many unseen trash mobs that would spawn in IMO. This became quite an annoyance about halfway through KotFE, and though it improved with ET, the improvement was too little too late IMO. The impression was made.

 

2) A few of the boss fights were more annoying than challenging.

Chapter 10, the Overwatch Hunters (I believe they were called) comes to mind. I remember this fight was VERY annoying, mobs constantly jumping away. I understand the idea that developers want to present unique fights, but the way to do this is the two mandalorian arena fight in Torch's Flame on Rishi before the final fight with Shae Vizla. Sure, they jumped away, but it was after engaging the player for quite a bit.

 

3) Little to no grouping ability.

This, IMO, was the biggest flaw for both of the expansions. Yes, they were single player oriented....so are the class stories. But unlike the class stories, players couldn't participate...you would have to run the exact same content again for every group member, after struggling to get them to the right instance.

 

At the very least each player should have had their own personal cutscene play when triggered. Might have been a bit tricky in a few spots, but if you match a companion to each individual player in the group then it works.

 

The third flaw pretty much killed the expansions ability to hold players IMO. They played alone, were thrown into a game with no need to connect with other players, and eventually left out of boredom IMO. There were some other smaller flaws, but they didnt play a part in the expansions failure to hold players from my perspective.

 

What do you guys think? Were there other contributing factors? And what should Bioware focus on in the future if it wants to release an expansion of this scope again?

Edited by LordArtemis
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Too much of it was personal instances, instead of proper planets with side-quests or daily areas you could visit again and again. It seems such a waste to make all this content and not leave it out there for us to visit when we want.

 

And most of the places you can visit again don't give you much reason to, other than mat gathering. This was too much of a departure from what came before for me. They aren't really game locations, they feel more like movie sets. I think Makeb and Shadow of Revan did this part better. Those expansions left you with ongoing stuff to revisit if you wanted. The newer ones are pretty much one-use, and while I enjoyed them I have no real desire to play them again with alts, so to me it seems like a tremendous waste of resources compared to the old way of doing it.

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Too much of it was personal instances, instead of proper planets with side-quests or daily areas you could visit again and again. It seems such a waste to make all this content and not leave it out there for us to visit when we want.

 

And most of the places you can visit again don't give you much reason to, other than mat gathering. This was too much of a departure from what came before for me. They aren't really game locations, they feel more like movie sets. I think Makeb and Shadow of Revan did this part better. Those expansions left you with ongoing stuff to revisit if you wanted. The newer ones are pretty much one-use, and while I enjoyed them I have no real desire to play them again with alts, so to me it seems like a tremendous waste of resources compared to the old way of doing it.

 

It's a good point. The original storyline was provided to players with reasons to return, but these expansions created huge game areas with little to no reason to return in most. Something I didn't think about.

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To me there are two major issues: the actual story and the logistics.

 

The story

Not going in full detail here but I found the story unsatisfactory, inconsistent and not a story that most of my characters would actually go along with.

 

The logistics

This is about how the story was delived. And I agree that the big mistake BW made there is to make everything instanced and not giving explorable areas as we were used to. There are in fact quite a few cool locations like new planets that you can only visit in the story instances. The same goes for Umbara and presumably for the next FP. Such missed opportunities.

I wished they would've gone for a way of making the stories repeatable without making them all instanced. Only the main boss fights need to be specifically instanced with different difficulty levels, not the entire stories. Considering how tedious the story missions already are as the op described it also kept me from being interested in doing the stories in the various difficulty modes. I might eventually do them once in Master Mode just to say I've done it but I'm not that bored just yet.

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What went wrong with Kotfe is they started rushing chapters, trying to sink too much into one month of work.

What went wrong with Kotet was the decision to scrap chapters and somehow consolidate what was supposd to be two more full sets of story chapters into a half set. They should have kept going and done it right, taking more then a month between chapters if needed.

 

As always, rushing was the biggest issue.

Edited by Suzsi
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Railroading.

This was the main problem for me. Obviously all characters had to end up in the same key locations - Odessen, for example, and later on, we all had to get to fight the Big Bad in the end.

But there wasn't any freedom of choice in how to get there. There was only one straight line to walk, regardless of if we were playing Rep or Imp, light or dark, Force-user or not. One straight line.

This annoyed me especially when Lana and Theron decided I should go meet this completely insane anarchist rebel on Zakuul. Some of my characters would have done it only to put a smoldering hole between said anarchist's eyes, others might have decided to use the situation, others would have flat-out refused, but there was no choice at all.

This no choice happened in pretty much every situation. Go there, do this, with whichever companion they let you bring. Go the same straight line everyone else does, not that you'll know because you're in your own instance and will hardly ever see another player.

 

Making all characters end up in the same place, fighting the same Big Bad in the end, doesn't mean the road to that end has to be the same for everyone. If they'd spent less time and effort on cutscenes featuring only the Valkorians, they could have added, for example, different side quests for light/dark side characters. Such as, "Go save this dude so he can bring food to hungry orphans outside Zakuul" or "Go blow the farm up so this dude can't bring food to hungry orphans to show whose in charge". Hey, why not make a couple of factions to rep up with? If we're gonna end up becoming the new boss of Zakuul, we might want to make some kind of impression in a more memorable way than simply choosing to become "emperor" or "savior". Every chapter could have worked toward this, as well as toward the Big Bad at the end, and would have also given us, the players, more to do in between the monthly chapters of KotFE. Oh, and weave in a WZ, too - how about that farm and those orphans? How about fighting other players over that? Or for those who don't like PvP (myself included), maybe we could have gathered materials for making that farm and orphanage safer or building a training camp to make little orphan soldiers?

(Urgh, this example is getting really dark. I'm sorry!)

 

What also ticked me off in a major way was all the betrayals (and they're still going on, or are they? Or is it a double-bluff? Doesn't make it much better even if it is). It made me (=my character) feel stupid. Why did Lana and Theron trust someone who was so obviously shifty to start with? And no matter how many times I chose the suspicious comments, the outcome was always the same. Sigh. My character is stupid/naive, and Lana and Theron are incompetent for ever bringing those traitors into our little club.

 

 

I could go on and on with what I felt went wrong with KotFEET and my ideas on how to make it better, but in the end, it really comes down to a few major things:

Freedom to move around the awesome new areas/planets

Focus on the player character, not on the Bad Guys in cutscenes

Options to choose different paths to reach the same ending point

Weave in WZs/Ops/FPs/Rep farms that support the story and the player's choices

Better pacing, so we actually get to play more than a few minutes in between cutscenes

Ability to play the story together with others

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I think the expansions were a huge failure, as it didn't make the target audience of solo players happy.

 

1) Story lovers got a story with limited Star Wars feel to it. Nothing about this was interesting or exciting to me. Mostly it felt extremely out of place in the SW universe. Just return to an Republic vs. Empire storyline.

 

2) solo explorer type players had no depth to their experience. There weren't true open worlds to explore. Nearly everything was hallway style planets.

 

3) The loot boxes weren't "RNG excitement" but instead were a dreaded chore. The game is 6 years old, make gearing simple and loot boxes just for fun extra stuff.

 

4) There was almost 0 cannon planets or other items in this cycle. I hope Bioware sets a rule of no newly invented planets ever again.

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1) Forced encounters.

The triggers for trash mobs were all over the place. Far too many unseen trash mobs that would spawn in IMO. This became quite an annoyance about halfway through KotFE, and though it improved with ET, the improvement was too little too late IMO. The impression was made.

The only thing about this issue that's special to KotFE/ET is "far too many". After seeing the complaints and playing through Skytrooper Central in Chapter X myself, I had reason to return to class story and similar content on other characters.

 

No, it isn't unique to KotFE/ET, as a general concept. What's unique in those expansions:

* The frequency of forced fights. Too many instances of "encounter skytroopers, fight, klill them, take one step, encounter more".

* Enemies that are fifty or sixty metres away and won't close with you. And they unstealth you (breaking "works only from stealth" attack theory) and they force you to "in-combat" run speed instead of Sprint.

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For me, and the thing that made me rage quit for over a year, was I realized, while playing through my Warrior that had kneeled to the Valkorion, that NONE OF MY CHOICES MATTERED! Seriously BioWare, you guys bungled that one spectacularly. The one chapter where you could have illustrated the differences between kneeling and not kneeling and you make it exactly the same.... Good job y'all. Shouldn't have marketed it as "Your choices matter!" When it was more of a "Your choices matter.... kinda.... sorta? Well ok, not really."
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1) My Character and My Choices No Longer Mattered

As others have pointed out, there were few choices of real significance or consequence that centered around my character. Valkorian and his family were the main characters while Thana and Theron were the rails to keep my POV on track so that Bioware's story could play out as they intended.

 

2) KotFE was not SWTOR

Let us be blunt; Knights was a port of Mass Effect into the SWTOR engine. The first chapter forced a major plot-retcon of Vitiate's character and goals and stripped each of our characters of their identity and companions in order to force us into the new character of the "Outlander."

 

My main is Darth Nox. He is a Dark Council Member. He has crushed Sith Lords and Jedi Masters under foot. he has gathered a force of companions and apprentices that do his bidding. He has delved into dark secrets and mastered the ability to dominate powerful Sith ghosts. He brought Makeb to its knees.

 

The Dread Lords and Darth Revan have fallen to his power.

 

And the first chapter of Knights erased all of it and reduced Darth Nox to a homeless idiot being lead by the nose thanks to the supreme intelligence and guidance of a Rebel Spy and what for all intents and purposes seems to be a Greyish "Sith" that Nox would have shocked to death immediately.

 

 

For me Knights was a hard reboot in a game where I was looking for an expansion of the original story.

 

To be honest, after playing through it I cancelled my sub and left for a while. The only reason I am back is that I want to finish all the Class Stories before this game gets shuttered like Heroes.

Edited by -IceHawk-
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I have some opinions about this, they are mine alone. Just wanted to make that clear.

 

I think the expansions were a success overall. They increased game visibility, brought in new players, and gave us some great storytelling. But, did they hold those new players, and what flaws existed that prevented the expansions from reaching their full potential?

 

Successful? Really? Game population is way down. Servers merged and into one data center should tell you a lot. I can't think of any metric that could be used to call KotFE and KotET a success. They go from a failure at best to a miserable disaster at worst. Even EA has stopped trying to spin them as being good for the game.

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1) My Character and My Choices No Longer Mattered

As others have pointed out, there were few choices of real significance or consequence that centered around my character. Valkorian and his family were the main characters while Thana and Theron were the rails to keep my POV on track so that Bioware's story could play out as they intended.

 

2) KotFE was not SWTOR

Let us be blunt; Knights was a port of Mass Effect into the SWTOR engine. The first chapter forced a major plot-retcon of Vitiate's character and goals and stripped each of our characters of their identity and companions in order to force us into the new character of the "Outlander."

 

My main is Darth Nox. He is a Dark Council Member. He has crushed Sith Lords and Jedi Masters under foot. he has gathered a force of companions and apprentices that do his bidding. He has delved into dark secrets and mastered the ability to dominate powerful Sith ghosts. He brought Makeb to its knees.

 

The Dread Lords and Darth Revan have fallen to his power.

 

And the first chapter of Knights erased all of it and reduced Darth Nox to a homeless idiot being lead by the nose thanks to the supreme intelligence and guidance of a Rebel Spy and what for all intents and purposes seems to be a Greyish "Sith" that Nox would have shocked to death immediately.

 

 

For me Knights was a hard reboot in a game where I was looking for an expansion of the original story.

 

To be honest, after playing through it I cancelled my sub and left for a while. The only reason I am back is that I want to finish all the Class Stories before this game gets shuttered like Heroes.

 

*waves to CoH'er* That's what I meant to say, except my main was the Wrath. Was..:o Don't forget to take screenshots of your characters, the few I have of my heroes and villains are like gold to me.

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They should have never forced all different classes into the exact same story. Better solution would have been the Eternal Empire as a general story line but allowing each class to combat the EE in a way suitable for their class and origin, with their own unique outcome.

 

They should have never taken all our companions away, 'friends' and crew members who've been at our side for years, without a fool proof plan of returning them in a timely and meaningful fashion.

 

The endless waves of trash mobs are a drag. Mobs that spawn over and over, who pop you out of stealth and aggro to you while they're miles outside of the usual aggro range forcing combat--it has no story purpose at all. Of course there's "immersion" but they could have achieved that with less mobs too, as in the older class stories.

 

Save for key encounters, things should have taken place mostly in the open world and not instances.

 

Though understandable, I don't like the way the game decides which companion I have with me during which chapter.

 

The entire notion of a 'third' power in the galaxy which we are now forced to lead--it feels out of place, it doesn't feel like Star Wars to me and I miss just the traditional Empire vs. Republic.

 

I feel alienated, on all my toons. As much as the story is catered to the Jedi Knight, even she feels out of place stuck on Odessen, stuck being a Peacekeeper and having this Eternal Fleet, tending to the people of Zakuul. She just wants to go home. My Sith Warrior recently finished FE/ET and I was *disgusted* doing the chapter with Acina who found it necessary to tell me, the WRATH, what life as a Sith is like. What the Empire is like and how they've always done things. Why? Because we've been forced into this Outlander role and now everyone treats us like clueless foreign dimwits.

 

The 'inconsistency' in which the release of chapters was handled. A chuck of chapters at once, then one per month, a dry spell, then all at once again. Companions being returned, BW suddenly withholding on returning those still missing, an entire chapter dedicated to Kaliyo for example but Dorne and Quinn being a mere fly in the background of their return chapter.

 

And as a personal little bit of huffing; they killed Darth frickin' Marr. :mad:

 

Oh and, 'choices matter'. While I appreciate the concept and feel it adds to the game, I don't like how it was handled. A choice you made 4-5 chapters or months ago, should not suddenly affect you now. 'Choices matter' should play out instantly and within the same chapter/game-play session. (re: Dorne refusing to continue a romance based on choices made back when no one even knew if or when she'd come back at all).

 

Think that's it for now.

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What i didn't find enjoyable about FE is the duration of the storyline as most of it was a seperate storyline and most of which should of fallen into a secondary group like the world storylines in addition to your main class storyline. An example would be Kaliyo and Jorgan's missions which had nothing specifically to do with the downfall of Arcann or Vaylin's empire.

 

With ET it was too short and a little more storyline would of been nice to explain a few things touched on previously like the dark shrine in the Gravestone and a little more on the events around Arcann's disappearance after chapter 1.

 

Anyway, this is old news now.

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Successful? Really? Game population is way down. Servers merged and into one data center should tell you a lot. I can't think of any metric that could be used to call KotFE and KotET a success. They go from a failure at best to a miserable disaster at worst. Even EA has stopped trying to spin them as being good for the game.

 

The metric would have been the obvious rise in population when they were released.

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As a solo player, KotFE/ET are not something I replay. In fact, I first tried KotFE on a main, something I still regret doing. I will never do KotFE/ET on all (or even the majority) of my characters. For me, the replayability is zero.

 

- The player's character is a passive observer to the story.

There was no illusion of the player's character having a say in what happened. Every class became the one size does not fit all Outlander/Commander, with no input of import. Outside of who is in cutscenes.

 

- Generic companions, a lot of them. A whole lot of them.

At most, I can use 9 companions. 8 on crew skill missions or crafting, and one out as the active companion. One of the few characters I have in KotFE has 30+ companions (I stopped counting). Other than cluttering up my companion UI, the multitude of companions serve no purpose. Not wanting to deal with a horde of companions is another reason to keep my characters out of KotFE/ET, not a reason to do it.

 

- Battle Boredom

Skytroopers, Skytroopers, Skytroopers. With a side of Skytroopers. Then, more Skytroopers.

 

- Busy work, not relevant missions.

After KotFE's chapter 9, there are many missions, each supposedly important. Recruitment alerts, Star Fortresses to take down, and grunt work (all those layabout NPCs on Odessen but only the Outlander/Commander can make that run for supplies?). Then finding out that doing all those missions, wading through all those Skytroopers, has zero impact on the KotFE story. Do the missions, or not, the end result is the same.

 

- The change from space opera to soap opera.

KotFE/ET are about Zakuul ruling family drama. The main characters are Valkorion, Senya, Arcann, and Vaylin -- not the player. What the player's character thinks, believes, wants to do, is irrelevant. The Zakuul ruling family squabbling is the same for the JK who battled the Emperor, or the Bounty Hunter looking for the next contract. Sit back and watch, until it's time to fight the next wave of Skytroopers.

Edited by Nmyownworld
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The only thing about this issue that's special to KotFE/ET is "far too many". After seeing the complaints and playing through Skytrooper Central in Chapter X myself, I had reason to return to class story and similar content on other characters.

 

No, it isn't unique to KotFE/ET, as a general concept. What's unique in those expansions:

* The frequency of forced fights. Too many instances of "encounter skytroopers, fight, klill them, take one step, encounter more".

* Enemies that are fifty or sixty metres away and won't close with you. And they unstealth you (breaking "works only from stealth" attack theory) and they force you to "in-combat" run speed instead of Sprint.

 

And also that if you use knockbacks and they fall down a level or two, they will still not disengage, die, or pursue. And then you have to waste your time chasing them down. That was really annoying.

 

But, yes, the frequency of the forced encounters, even when stealthing, was ridiculous. I'm glad they worked on it, but they should also have gone back and adjusted it on the bad early chapters.

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All important have been already said but I would add one more thing I really hate about KotFE/ET. They are impossible to ignore. They changed SWTOR game universe and even if I would like to ignore them I cannot. They made significant changes in game world which cannot be undone. :(((
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For me, and the thing that made me rage quit for over a year, was I realized, while playing through my Warrior that had kneeled to the Valkorion, that NONE OF MY CHOICES MATTERED! Seriously BioWare, you guys bungled that one spectacularly. The one chapter where you could have illustrated the differences between kneeling and not kneeling and you make it exactly the same.... Good job y'all. Shouldn't have marketed it as "Your choices matter!" When it was more of a "Your choices matter.... kinda.... sorta? Well ok, not really."

 

^This. You're absolutely right. If they didn't want to make things different for faction or force/non-force users, this would have been a great point to split into difference.

 

Alas, you still end up arguing with and fighting Valkorian even if you chose to serve him. Sad.

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They should have never forced all different classes into the exact same story. Better solution would have been the Eternal Empire as a general story line but allowing each class to combat the EE in a way suitable for their class and origin, with their own unique outcome.

 

They should have never taken all our companions away, 'friends' and crew members who've been at our side for years, without a fool proof plan of returning them in a timely and meaningful fashion.

 

The endless waves of trash mobs are a drag. Mobs that spawn over and over, who pop you out of stealth and aggro to you while they're miles outside of the usual aggro range forcing combat--it has no story purpose at all. Of course there's "immersion" but they could have achieved that with less mobs too, as in the older class stories.

 

Save for key encounters, things should have taken place mostly in the open world and not instances.

 

Though understandable, I don't like the way the game decides which companion I have with me during which chapter.

 

The entire notion of a 'third' power in the galaxy which we are now forced to lead--it feels out of place, it doesn't feel like Star Wars to me and I miss just the traditional Empire vs. Republic

...an entire chapter dedicated to Kaliyo for example but Dorne and Quinn being a mere fly in the background of their return chapter.

Much of what JennyFlynn said however adding my two-pence worth (assume spoilers):

  • Companion-Gate: forcibly removing my LIs and crew and having no plan of returning most of them in some cases for 6+ years in the "story" and 2+ years in reality. Replacing original companion models with new inferior models. The Iokath return fail. My warriors were MARRIED to Quinn and you managed to completely forget this and treated him like a second class NPC because of your perceived view that all players hated him. WRONG. and you still haven't given us the opportunity to replay iIokath with companion customisations intact so we get Dorne/Quinn back looking as we preferred. My female troopers who considered Dorne a close friend found her replaced by a stepford clone. Failure of the highest order with Quinn and Dorne's return :mad: HK-55 and Z0-0M: their chapter was a good example of how a side story could work but as companions they are both awful. Aspects of the story forced us to take a couple of dozen more companions (plus) who have no role other than clogging up my companion list. Why was Gault elevated so high above LIs and other favourite companions that he got his own chapter?
  • Skytroopers everywhere and no opportunity to get one as a companion - I like their model & I like their armour especially this one.
  • Making stealth irrelevant in most chapters by forcing all mobs encounters on everyone
  • Killing off Darth Marr and then making his force ghost pathetic
  • Removing my character as the story centre and handing that role to Lana and Theron
  • Being forced to participate in terrible conversations with NPCs one example being Acina who seems to have forgotten my Sith Inq was on the Dark Council and my Warrior was the Empire's Wrath.
  • Story aspects that made no sense - Scorpio is a prime example; she becomes basically unkillable/all powerful (she rematerialises from consciousness to fully formed droid in one chapter yet in another one shot/stab can kill her). Same with Vaylin - we should not have been able to kill her once she unleashed her true power. As much as I disliked her it would have made more sense if she could have been redeemed and able to control her powers.
  • Being forced to take play alongside NPCs or companions that I would have had no hesitation killing from the first conversation (I'm looking at you Kaliyo)
  • I want to say no class story but they were gone long before starting with Makeb but at least that and SoR felt like Star Wars
  • Making my characters a "Commander". That title address sounds pathetic for all classes especially on my Dark Lords
  • Turning Arcann into a moron and a lacky; we should have been able to have him join us with his dark personality intact
  • The 'Choices Matter' lie. Our choices didn't matter one iota. The story forced us to take options without considering some might prefer a neutral route as in Iokath. Side with the Empire or Republic? I wanted neither.
  • Iokath "chapter" or whatever it was. *** bioware? Everything was terrible, yet the chapter where we were forcibly transported to Iokath played out okay (except being forced to team up with Vette).

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