I have only played on the imp side of the quest chain but I have to say it is one of the best in the game. The number of dark side / light side options is spot on. NPC's were great with good voice acting and were characters I could really get into. I wish the villain was more prominent though. I felt they made an appearance every now and then as a reminder that there is a bad person. I would have liked to have seen this character developed further than they were, it would have made the final confrontation even more epic.

All in all I give the story line a 8.5/10 for Makeb, I think Bioware did a great job.

A few things I would like to see in the future.

1. Individual class story lines, makes replay a lot easier

2. More quests in general. We heard a lot about the people of Makeb through the story but never saw them. It would have been nice to see more quests that took you off the beaten trail. I felt quest progression was far to linear.

I've only played the Imperial side of Makeb to completion but I have to agree, the use of cinematics and a slightly more gripping story with the respect of what your playing for makes for a good story.

The only downside is that choice still seems to have no effect. Without going into it specifics or spoilers all the options seem to play out the same. Saving people or killing them it doesn't appear they are ever seen again.

I've only played the Imperial side of Makeb to completion but I have to agree, the use of cinematics and a slightly more gripping story with the respect of what your playing for makes for a good story.

 

The only downside is that choice still seems to have no effect. Without going into it specifics or spoilers all the options seem to play out the same. Saving people or killing them it doesn't appear they are ever seen again.

If that'st he case that is disappointing. I only played through once on the imp side and was hoping different choices would mean characters survive.

I'm around halfway of the imperial story and I have to say that the story isn't as bad as I was afraid it would be. Better than normal planetary quests, but imo nothing compared to what my sniper's storyline used to be. But I guess I can live with that.

What I really loved was the starting of the Makeb storyline. I thought the dialogue would be pretty much same for everyone, expect that people would call my sniper "agent" and my sith "my lord", but me and the guy who called actually had a nicely long conversation about the decisions I made in my chapter 3s finale. Actually,

The only downside is that choice still seems to have no effect. Without going into it specifics or spoilers all the options seem to play out the same. Saving people or killing them it doesn't appear they are ever seen again.

It kind of has to be that way given that regardless of what you do the game world(s) must remain static. The story will always take a backseat to the game(play) in that regard. They could've used phasing (changing elements in the world based on player choices) to make things a bit more impactful, but they decided against it in the development process.

Most large games are this way though, including most of Bioware's RPGs, ie much of the game isn't effected outside of cutscenes.

The Imperial Agent storyline is probably the best storyline in reflection of choices, but in most cases the choices result in different characters being swapped in and out of cutscenes. In other words the scenes themselves don't really change all that much, just the characters with in them.

Within the world of games if you want choices to matter more or be more varied you basically need to make the world(s) smaller. It'll reduce the time of a single play through, however it allows the developers to have a wider range of choices. The first Way of The Samurai game was really good about doing this. You could beat it an hour or two but you'd play through it a dozen times over.

I'd love to see them (Bioware) do more planets like the starter planets. I feel like with smaller worlds they could pack in alot more content and make all the quests much more memorable.

The cutscenes were excellent, the story was boring and generic with the exceptions of the beginning and the very end.

Class stories are a better investment.

The best part of Makeb were the few times the dialogue and cutscenes reflected your class. That speaks volumes.

The cutscenes were excellent, the story was boring and generic with the exceptions of the beginning and the very end.

 

Class stories are a better investment.

 

The best part of Makeb were the few times the dialogue and cutscenes reflected your class. That speaks volumes.

The problem is that the class stories take longer to produce and cost alot more to do.

Think about how long it took for them to produce Makeb and how much content it has in it, now split that 8 ways. For example if Makeb was 8 hours of content then that same amount of time and money would've gotten you eight 1 hour long class stories.

Sadly they're no longer in the position to deliver content on the same level and scale as that of the original game. It's not surprising either really. I mean the vanilla game costs hundreds of millions to produce, but at this point, post F2P, their annual budget for developing new content has gotta be pretty low number.

Think about how long it took for them to produce Makeb and how much content it has in it, now split that 8 ways. For example if Makeb was 8 hours of content then that same amount of time and money would've gotten you eight 1 hour long class stories.

True, it did take awhile but Bioware also spent significant time overhauling the games business model (F2P) which took a lot of resources. I'm really hoping with the new influx of cash we will see individual story lines again.

Again, I still think the overall story line was great. I did enjoy from my bounty hunter experience when I told the lead female role to treat me with respect, she brought that choice up in a later dialogue. This was great in IMO and hopefully we'll see more of this type of dialogue in the future. I'm not ready to poo poo the whole thing. There is room for improvement but I think Bioware did a pretty good job with their first semi-expansion of the game.