I'm not a fan so far. It seems to be falling prey already to the KotFE problem of you being a co-star, your galaxy shaking force user getting slapped all over the place by everyone and there being no recognition of who you used to be. In fact, it's worse than KotFE already. Darth Imperius, Lord of the Dark Council, Head of the Pyramid of Ancient Knowledge, returns from the dead at the head of an army and Empress Acina is all "Hi, random traveller! You might recognise me from such tyrannies as the Sith Empire! We're darwinian, you know, and our capital is dangerous. Let us chat as though you're a republic citizen and not the most dire threat in the galaxy to me remaining Empress!"

Not sure if you've misunderstood me there. You pay to play for fun and nobody is paying you to do anything here, therefore it isn't work and equating it with work is ridiculous. If you're doing things in the game and you're not enjoying them just for the sake of doing them to the point that you call them work, then you've gone badly wrong somewhere, because you're paying for the privilege of doing something you don't like.

You know that people are supposed to pay you to work, right? Not the other way around.

If you're trying to equate working hard to playing a game, you're doing both wrong. There is no moral superiority to be found in wasting more time today for digital currency, designed to keep you subscribed for longer, than you did last week.

That was a pretty bad chapter for me. Certainly a massive drop in quality compared to the Vette & Gault one. Scorpio's betrayal has been telegraphed with all the subtlety of a breezeblock to the face, the fake choice at the end... "Oh noes, I can only launch them one at a time for reasons, I wonder what will happen to the last one...", the endless identical corridors with more Skytroopers. We're on a starship in an asteroid field. Put in some windows and have a view once in a while before the very end. Yet more bickering from companions and a member of the Dark Council apparently puts up with it? I'm just not impressed. The only good thing about the entire chapter is that Arcann's flagship looks totally boss and I want to steal it. Also it occurred to me that the Gravestone being a mobile seat for the Alliance would have made a lot more sense than having a planet bound base. Also would have made it useful, which having your own personal battlecruiser has unaccountably failed to be so far.

Sorry, I'm not engaging with this event. I'm not getting salty about things not being retrospective, I'll just forego the rewards from it. I will not encourage the concept that bribing me with shiny crap I don't need to replay content I've already done or do things I don't want to do is a good idea. Because then you'll do it more.

They didn't need to even do that. Instead of "go chat with Valkorian" it could have been "you sense an oddly familiar disturbance in the Force" or "the Force user enclave insists that something vital is happening in the Wilds that requires your presence" and so avoided the whole issue. Some of the writing in KotFE has been iffy when it's come to handling fairly basic splits like Force user/non-Force user and with/without Valkorian.

The in universe explanation is that the Galactic Empire is an empire controlled by the last heir to the Sith Order. Star Destroyers, TIE fighters etc, were deliberately designed in traditional Sith styles and much of the aesthetic of Palpatine's empire is similar to the Sith Empire's as a way to stamp their almost extinct culture back onto the galaxy.

I'm guessing that, at the end of this season, you end up on the Eternal Throne whether you want to or not. Then the Eternal Fleet will be destroyed by an unavoidable plot device, the Republic and Empire kick off in a vast multiple front civil war between different factions in each organisation and each other and you'll have to lead the Alliance to unify the galaxy and bring an end to it, whether you want to or not. I would be hugely surprised if they had separate storylines, as I've just played through a chapter where the Empire's Wrath gets smack talked by an alien in a box until Gault saves the day with threats of wookie choristers, instead of just wrenching the durasteel and cortosis door off it's hinges with the force and following through on his promise.

He's never shown any love for the Sith, or interest in the Sith code. All he's even been shown to have an interest in is remaking the galaxy in his own image. It was assumed that meant destroying it to become a force god, however as you say maybe it was just to destroy a failed experiment and give his new toy space to grow. Or maybe the whole thing was just a distraction to keep the Republic and the Empire enmeshed in the very war that left them vulnerable to Zakuul. After all he is thousands of years old at least and clearly thinks in terms of civilisations and centuries rather than any scale other people would think at. They could, if they wanted, assign almost anything to Valkorian's plan, because that's the sheer scale of the character they've created. I would imagine that moving forward it's going to be very difficult to avoid "Valkorian did it!!" as the basis for most of the story they've built.

I suspect that Valkorian is a civilisation builder. When the Sith fled the Republic a thousand years ago he saw them as an ideal opportunity to forge a perfect civilisation, so he assumed the identity of a Sith Lord, cast down any pretenders and spent the next 700 years forging one. When Revan and Malak encountered him he saw a perfect opportunity to see how the society he'd built would actually function outside of his direct control. What he found was that the hyper Darwinian nature of Sith society made them incapable of remaining unified without someone unassailably powerful in charge, so without him it would collapse. So he abandoned the Sith and searched for another candidate, finding one on Zakuul. He spent another 300 years creating a perfect society again, correcting the flaws of the Sith. He used his failed experiment to critically weaken the galaxy, the Treaty of Coruscant and the Cold War deliberate sabotaging of the Empire's war to prevent their victory and keep both sides weakening each other and building enough hate to never co-operate. Now he's running another experiment. Zakuul can take on a divided, shattered galaxy intent on continuing it's internal conflict, but he wants to see if it's truly a perfect society that can survive the transition into a wider galaxy and away from his control. So he lets Arcann have his coup and sits back to see what happens. I think he made a mistake with Arcann and Vaylin though, so now he's using the Outlander to correct it. He's trying to mold the Outlander into the leader he wanted Arcann to be, so his grand civilisation building can be a success and imprint his design on the entire galaxy.

Kallig lived 1500ish years before TOR, he's your character's ancestor only in the same way that some ravening Germanic pirate is my ancestor, with no connection between the two apart from weak genetic links. All it requires is one of the 50 or so generations between Kallig and your alien character to have reproduced with that species and you have a Twi'lek or a Rattataki descended from a human or Pureblood Sith Lord. Even with species who can't interbreed in normal Star Wars lore there's always dubious Sith alchemy to crowbar it in.

There's no such thing as speciest. Racism is moronic because you take a minor difference in the same species and blow it out of proportion. Two entirely seperate species are inherent competitors and if you don't subscribe to a viewpoint which values sentience the other species is going to be less to you than your own. Also you're treated like dirt as an alien on Korriban because you are just an alien. You've not proven yourself to be anything else and you've got nothing tying you to the wellbeing of the Empire. By the time you can put Lord in front of your name you're Sith and you've proven you're the elite, whether pureblood, human or alien you stand by your own power and cunning. They don't make you a Darth and then throw you out with a shout of "Alien Scum!!!" after all.

I wasn't even thinking about that sort of preference. Sith are very much a Darwinian, survival of the fittest society. They don't have any concept of the value of sentience or any other intangible idea, they work with power, passion and the law of the jungle. Aliens are therefore competitors for space, resources and dominance and without any regard for some ephemeral concept of the value of sentience they're worth nothing. They've not got a vested interest in the well-being of Sith culture, they can't pass on the Sith-Human hybrid species or anything. It's not "that guy looks different, I hate him", it's "That's a competitor, we must destroy it". If it was the former then alien Sith or Agents wouldn't be possible, once their value and adherence to Sith ideals is established they become accepted regardless of their species. If it were a case of "funny lookin' aliens" they'd never be allowed into any high positions.

Read it again. Preference towards your own species is not racist, it's just nature. The Empire would be racist if it discriminated against pink Sith or black humans, which it does not.

As far as I know the Empire loses Balmorra back to the Republic, while it manages to destroy Republic efforts to rebuild Taris. That's why the two worlds are swapped around in level brackets for the two factions.

How is the Empire racist anyway? I've ran into NPCs of every colour and nobody makes the slightest reference to it. They may dislike aliens, but giving your own species preferential treatment over a completely unrelated species is pretty much universal outside the minds of fiction writers looking for a blunt racism analogy.

You've not played enough Imperial side then. I was expecting the old RP English=Evil connection, but you run across Scottish, Welsh, Northern English and I'm sure I heard a bit of Somerset at one point. Apart from the lack of N. Irish accents it pretty much is British=Empire.

If you're going to go right back to who killed who first, the Sith rulers are descended from Jedi hunted and exiled into the wilderness for splitting with the Order. That's the ultimate reason why the hatred started and why it's so strong, the whole thing is almost a civil war with the Empire and Republic caught in the middle.

It's better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven is the gist of it. Imperial Agents are the very elite of non-force users in the Empire, an Agent outranks everyone that's not a Sith, whether they're human or not. The Sith are a strangely meritocratic society. If you're powerful, cunning, ambitious, ruthless enough to rise above the herd then you rise, whether you're a slave or an alien. You may get insulted and slighted on the way, but if you care what mouthy vermin say about you you're not tough enough to make it anyway.

If anyone remembers Crossroads Keep from Neverwinter Nights 2, that is what I'd have liked to see at endgame alongside the raids, flashpoints and PvP. As many have pointed out before, making constant story content for 8 classes is probably an impossible job. However, every class ends at a point where they'd logically be capable of running something larger than themselves. Sith with temples, cults or other power bases, BH's with a mercenary band, Agents with subdivisions of Imperial Security or their own forces and similar for the other side. They could then have the player invested into building and running this operation with repeatable daily and weekly quests, crafting quests, little storylines, that sort of thing. I'd find that a "hook" to keep me invested at end game, something to progress and spend time on without gear grinds or unbalancing the other content.

I think the problem for me is that it's mixing up two things that I've seen and done many times before. The 1-49 game is the best leveling I've seen in an MMO, mainly because it's a Bioware singleplayer formula from five years ago that Bioware themselves have abandoned now: start>4 zones>end zone>boss>endgame. Only in TOR it's end of Chapter 1, in Chapter 2 you start>4 zones... Then at 50, as many have said in this thread, it's the totally classic MMO raid or die that has been seen over and over again that the industry is starting to move away from. It's fun to play through once, but I suspect unless you're the kind of guy who played Mass Effect through 15 times there's not enough variety to sustain more than a couple of playthroughs. Likewise at 50, if you're the old school MMO player who loves the instance/raid playstyle you're golden, but if you don't or are just sick of it there's nothing else. I can see where they were coming from, melding classic Bioware singleplayer RPG with MMO endless content should have been a winner, but in the 5+ years since they started it both Bioware RPGs and MMOs have undergone some serious changes, both good and bad depending on PoV, while TOR remains a snapshot frozen in time of exactly how things were when they had the idea.

The Endgame is well served if you enjoy Flashpoints or Operations, it's average if you enjoy PvP, it's non-existent if you're expecting anything else. Story, solo instancing, companions, crafting all stop at 49, unless you want to count Ilum's awful dailies.

The Sith weren't primitive technologically, they had a stellar Empire 20,000 years earlier when they forced the Rakata to retreat from their space. They were weaker in raw Dark Side power than the Jedi exiles however, which is how they became worshipped. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sith_%28species%29 A lot of the comments about the "primitive and barbaric" Sith seem to be people's own interpretation of their culture including blood rites and not recognising the concept of peace or war rather than a description of the technological prowess.

As far as I know Lucasarts always demands that the lightside ending is the canon one.