That was pretty much my feeling, after a great deal of thought.

I'm frustrated by

Eh, Hunter is often fairly civil, if you play nice with him. A few I can remember...

At the very least, there's some dialogue in the game that basically says that the Force users consider all non-Force users to be beneath their notice. Which is where the Star Cabal thrives...they're pretty much ignored/disregarded because the Emperor/Jedi/whatever else is like, "Whatever...you're just a bunch of force blind wannabes..." So it does seem entirely possible that the Jedi and the Sith sort of know about them...just don't care all that much. And the Star Cabal exploits that as a way of killing all of them.

Just to rub some salt in the wounds, it only gets worse.

Hunter has some...interesting objectives. There are a lot of ways of reading the ways he behaves towards you. I will agree that at first he's more or less friendly , then suddenly becomes...less so. There are reasons. You'll perhaps figure them out. I don't want to spoil them yet...

I'm guessing that the Star Cabal are mostly opportunists. They strike when they can, hide otherwise. And from that perspective, yeah, I can see them doing pretty well. They hide, they make a move when it looks likely to pay off, and otherwise they just slink about in shadows. I doubt the Emperor knows about them, but who knows?

I think so too. But to be fair, a lot of the male romances are: Kaliyo: EVIL skank (I love her, but I can see how Temple: Boring, then oh so creepy Vette: Sick, twisted, and Stockholmed Jaesa: Really demented. Just...really demented. Ashara: Jail bait mixed with social worker. How can this go wrong? Mako: Like dating your kid sister Risha: Spoiled brat Akaavi: Boring Elara: Boring Kira: (OKay, I have nothing bad to say about this one) Nadia: So freaking twisted, I can't even start on it... Although men get a lot more choices so less sympathy. But still...an awful lot of the female LIs are pretty twisted as well. (Or boring. Or, in Temple's case, both.)

Yeah, the complaints make me think, "Well, someone wasn't paying all that much attention..."

I miss male Hunter, too. He was a remarkably *fun* villain. With that said, we have no idea what the woman who played Hunter was actually like as a person. We get a very small glimpse of her at the end. Almost all we know is that she was the Star Cabal's enforcer...and that she seemed to be having the time of her life in creating a remarkably fun, yet utterly screwed up, alter-ego. I'm really curious what she *would* have been like, and sort of wish she'd been kept alive so that you could try to figure that out in later chapters.

This is probably a bit overdue, but the possible Chap 1 endings are:

I think a lot of us wanted that option. With that said...

You know, I would have agreed around launch. At this point, I worry that we'll *never* get a chapter 4. (Since I'm not sure that the game has the numbers to justify the programming that would be required for that.) And since that was always a very real possibility, it would have been nice had all of the classes had a fairly solid stopping point at the end of chapter 3. I felt like some did...but that agent really feels like it ends with a big "To be Continued". Which will be very frustrating if the story isn't continued in the future.

I love my canon character too! (Which is why, all things equal, I'd prefer to play the game as intended with a chapter 4, 5, whatever.) But...it does seem possible that stories won't be continued. (Esp. with a FTP model, where it seems plausible that the team will go after simpler revenue streams than developing content that can only be accessed by one class.) And if that happens, most likely, any stories that have already been written *would* be thrown out. (As the writing is the cheap part of the game development. The expensive parts involve all that animation.) So...if we're in a scenario where Bioware/EA isn't thinking that programming chapter 4 and on is worth it, *but* the stories have already been written, I would *far* prefer the stories released in some form rather than left to molder on a corporate computer. (Where they're no good to anyone.) Bioware in particular has had an amazing track record of collaborating with fans to produce mods, etc....and I'd really rather see fans try to mod additional game play (or even just write fiction that details the continuation of character stories) to some kind of scenario where all that awesome story is trunked.

I'm still very much hoping for a chapter 4 (and 5 and 6 and whatever) release. However, I'm a bit worried that FTP etc. means that the later chapters will never be developed. Which would make me and many other fans sad. But...I was thinking that it seems likely that some development work (at the very least the scripts) probably is finished for at least chapter 4. (Seeing as a lot of the writers were employed for a while after game launch.) If these scripts do exist, would Bioware consider... 1. Novelizing them? While I'd rather play the game the way it was intended than read a tie in novel/novella, I still want to learn what happens next. (And a novel or comic would be awesome!) 2. Releasing the existing work to fans. (After all, Bioware has a lot of passionate fans who've done things like redone the ending to KOTOR 2 and write some amazing fan fiction. So...if the scripts are out there, I'd guess that someone would do something pretty awesome with them.) Mostly I'd just like to see what comes next, and hate the idea that there might be some amazing writing out there that the world will never see.

To be honest, I don't think that your average Sith *gets* intelligence. My SW, anyway, really saw any good foe as one she could clobber with a lightsaber. She wasn't very smart. She wasn't particularly clever. She saw something's physical (and Force) strength as it's greatest determinant of value. (This bit is hinted at when you're told that the Sith and Jedi aren't paying attention to the Star Cabal because they don't care about almost anything that's non-Force related. They're like little demi-gods, playing games with their magic powers, unaware that there's stuff out there that may be even more powerful than their magic pixie dust.) Intelligence is the complete opposite of the Sith. It doesn't value magic; it values technology. It doesn't value brute strength; it values cunning. Is it any surprise that the Sith don't know what to do with it other than strip it of its assets? Not really. From everything we see in the game, neither the Jedi nor the Sith are overly crafty. They're just a bunch of kids with super powers. That's the whole *point* of agent - that giving a bunch of ordinary humans super powers and letting them do whatever they want is a horrible, terrible thing for the 99% of people in the universe who don't happen to have those super powers.

I thought the point of having all these high ranking members of the Star Cabal was so that the email wasn't spam from John Doe. When you're getting crucial intelligence from Minder 17 or the second ranking person in the SIS (both of which positions Hunter held), or the an important crime lord (Nok Drayden) or a high ranking exec in Czerka well...it's not exactly spam.

That's really the whole point of agent, isn't it? You're not tough. You're not an all powerful demi-god. But you control who knows what. And that's more powerful than a lightsaber being wielded by someone with Force leap. Look at Issen 4 as an example. The reason the war gets started is because there's a Republic base, they surrender to the Imperials, then you wander in (pursing Hunter, based on some intelligence W2/Keeper has gathered), and they are all found massacred. (Hunter's doing, again.) Totally makes sense from the Republic's POV to base a war on this. Some innocent colonists surrender and are massacred by an agent of the Empire. The Empire, of course, is furious because, from their POV, a rogue SIS agent pretty much arranged the whole thing to make them look bad. You're both played. (And this may happen in other storylines. For instance, the cold war starts to heat up for all classes in Chapter 2. Why? All kinds of reasons, depending on class. But some of that mysterious information both sides keep getting as to where the key targets are, etc. may be being slipped to them by the Star Cabal.) That's the point of the Star Cabal. They keep pulling strings until everyone is killing everyone. (And the only reason that they haven't already pulled this off, according to the game, is that they haven't really wanted to. Up until some time in the recent past, they've just tried to prevent either the Jedi or Sith from getting too powerful. It was only lately that they decided "let's kill them all". And that took some prep work, which is only approved 6 months prior to the start of Chapter 3.)

Sadly, I felt like the game totally teased me with the possibility of letting me do this, just to tear it all cruelly away, leaving my character a brittle mess. But maybe things will go better for you. *sigh*

Depending on how detailed you want, you can always check out Youtube for entire playthroughs. One of the challenges with a storyline summary is that there are a fair number of choices you can make in game that impact what happens with that story fairly significantly.

I haven't played through all (only finished everything for sW and IA, although I've gotten through ch. 2 for trooper, counselor, and knight and have played a bit of BH and SM.) Like you, I really like JK. It would not surprise me in the least if it was the plot for KOTOR 3. And even if it's not, it certainly is the "typical" Star Wars plot. It is the story that the game is based around. And, yeah, it's truly epic and has some great characters. OTOH, I still like agent better. I think that it's because, in large part, it's an inversion of everything Star Wars is. It asks the question, "What would an ordinary person's life be like in a world where there are these feuding demi-gods wandering around?" (Answer - pretty terrible.)

Her story goes pretty much the same whether you sleep with her or not. I think as a female agent, the whole little aside just never happens. (So she spends even less time on screen.) Boo.

I think that video game writing can have advantages over traditional writing. In general, I'd say that it's not as good as that found in novels. But...there is some video game writing out there that has made me think/feel every bit as intensely as great literature. (*cough, cough, Planescape Torment, cough*) I think it's even possible in the MMO genre (*cough, cough, imperial agent storyline*) But I do think that every time you add a limitation, you make it harder to create great literature. Figure that for an MMO, you have to write a story where a) the story sort of works with the pre-exiting notion of the class, b) you must have five companions, each with the correct selection of abilities (who may or may not be with the main character at any given time), c) you must go to the same planets, in the same order, as everyone else (and have decent reasons for doing it), d) you have to make the player feel important, while not actually letting them change the world in any significant way, etc. etc. and yeah...you have a hard task. Some writers obviously did a better job than others. And most classes have at least a slow planet or two, where you realize that the writer reallyc couldn't figure out how to advance the plot over the planet. But...I'm still fairly impressed by what the end result for SWTOR was, given the enormous constraints.