I am huge fan of Bioware games where you can play bits over and over again. I must have played through Mass effect 1 and 2 at least a dozen times each, and back in the day I played through KOTOR 1 a lot more than that.

 

However in an MMO because levelling a character up to 50 takes so long, and because you can't save your game at a certain point, you cannot play a part of the game again without starting a new character from scratch. This can be a huge let down for two reasons.

 

1. Unknown outcomes. Because the decisions we make in conversations can have a drastic effect on the plot of the game. I find myself all the time looking up what outcomes the different choices will have before I have even made them. This means I am in effect spoiling my own experience of playing the game, just so that my final character will be how I want them to be. In games where you can save such as Mass Effect, what I would do at these points is just save, and then play the game safe in the knowledge that I can always go back and do things differently later. This takes some of the pressure off decisions and means I do not end up looking for spoilers and ruining my play experience.

 

2. Seeing things again. Some bits of SWTOR are so well written and produced that they are like a movie. But if you want to see a bit of a movie you bought again you can always rewind it. In SWTOR you cannot do this, and to see bits again we are forced to search things like youtube, hoping someone has made a video of what we want to see. But even that experience is second rate as we cannot choose dialogue, and the character will usually not look or sound like ours. There should be a way of replaying some of the plot of SWTOR, and to change some of your plot choices, without having to make a new character, and grind your way up to level 50 again.

 

What I would suggest as a solution would be this. Implement a "story reset" option. I would suggest allowing people to start their class stories again from the start, but at the same time allowing them to keep their higher level, as well as any currency, gear and other rewards they have already collected (prompting them to take any gear they dont want to lose off their companions first). Doing this should make people give up all their companions and their starship, and any quest played that has been done before should provide no experience or rewards of any kind. In order to make the early quests not a series of 1 hit K.O.s you could increase the level of the enemies in story areas, or reduce the hit points and damage of the player (like the opposite of the boosting system for low players in pvp).

 

This would be a great way to solve both of the issues above, as it would remove the finality of choices made. If I knew this option would be available later, I would not feel the need to look up the outcomes of all my decisions quite so often. And it provides a way to replay some of the great moments in SWTOR without having to start completely from scratch again.

 

If this was ever done I would suggest making people unable to do it more than once a month, and I am not sure what I would do about alignment (perhaps leaving this unchanged) or companions affection (which could be left unchanged or be reset). And I would even go as far as to say that because this option would take a lot of work on the part of BioWare to make viable, I could cost us money to use it.

 

What do people think?

 

Is this a good, or a bad idea?

 

Would you pay £5 or £10 to be able to do this?

 

Can you think of any exploits or reasons why this should not be done?

 

Thank you for reading.

Edited August 19, 2012 by Antaeus

Eh I dunno if players shouldn't get rewards, they could in credits and level 50 gear. Would also be a good way to gear up companions too, in doing so that at the end they could have lvl 50 gear. Edited August 19, 2012 by Wolfninjajedi

I wouldn't pay to do this, but would love the option. Especially if there was a way to tune it to level 50.

Most of the class story content takes place inside instanced areas. So they'd just need to set the instanced areas to scale according to player level, but only after they've completed the class story content on a given planet.

 

Personally, I'm unsure about companion conversation gains still taking place in this fashion though, since it could certainly allow for "abusing" the companion affection system.

At the same time though, running FPs in non HM/Nightmare allows for the same thing, which is why I'm unsure about it.

Well this has been suggested before. I completely agree with it. It would be nice to be able to just do all the class storyline related quests again. But the thing I fear about this is that this way I would probably not relive the initial experience. I think that by skipping the planetary quests I would be missing out a lot. Edited August 19, 2012 by Path-x

I'd like to be able to reset parts of companion stories, because the responses you can select are so ridiculously ambiguous...the outcome is often different than what I had intended.

I agree with this, made some choices that I wasn't too thrilled with down the line. Problem is some choices go further such as sparing someone and having them show up at a later quest unless it's a total storyline reset.

Honestly, I'd do this even if it didn't come with any sort of reward or incentive, I just really like New Game+ modes in my RPGs.

 

I wrote a similar thread over a year ago or so about the option to "reset" story instances and a longer reset than just your current mission.

I've never known "when" precisely a conversation will end with a NPC that you're talking with in-game and so sometimes it just abruptly ends. I can't redo that conversation without reseting the whole quest, and sometimes you can't even do that either. They just end abruptly and I can't reverse it at all, different outcomes to your quest and "what ifs" have to be googled every time before doing important quests, I've been doing this since almost launch, and the amount of times it has ended without me being able to do anything about it has been frustrating beyond belief.

Creating new characters from scratch is the worst, just because you weren't prepared or fast enough to press "ESC" for that abrupt ending to your conversation and/or quest.

 

Yes I would definitely pay for such an option as a (long)reset on class story.

Edited October 9, 2013 by cirruz

What's the issue with beginning a storyline from the very beginning once more, like in old fashioned games, like Fallout, Baldur's Gate or even Mass Effect? I honestly don't get it.

Well I know I've clicked the wrong thing at times, and just been too slow in pressing "ESC" in conversations cause of several reasons and thus got myself a quick end to the convos and sometimes the quests themselves. Too many times you can't reverse them, which is almost always possible in singleplayer games like the ones you mentioned darth_wicked, Fallout and Mass effect etc.

I also think it would just be quite convenient for many people to just do the story quests and not lvl up to 50-55 to redo the story again. Not that the overall game is boring but, you know the same kind of quests and whatnot over and over again is not so appealing after a while, and less so when you just want to experience the story again.

In games such as Mass effect and Fallout, you can choose what you want to do most of the times, side quest or not you wont be outleveled and faced with impossible "red marked quests" when you have a go at the main story.

Edited October 11, 2013 by cirruz

Yes i would pay many ,many cartel coins to do this and also .... to reset my advanced class .

i would pay for such an option as it would also make me try other options and still keep the game interesting ....

This would be so nice to have, and it can even tie into the "Chapter" Mechanics used for KotFE and KotET