It's also possible we don't have all the pieces of the puzzle yet to understand who or what Vitiate and Valkorian are entirely. All we know is that for the longest time Vitiate/Tenebrae was a sith, who devoured all life on Nethema, and then took over the Sith Empire, and was the recluse Emperor that no one but his Hands, Children, and Voice ever interacted with. Till we interact with a disembodied voice on Yavin and Ziost. And every thing we know about Vitiate is from interactions with those parts of him, which Valkorian says in Chapter 2 "Our Flesh is not who we are" as he then lists all the things we interacted with that was supposed to be him/Vitiate. There is so much dialogue and text in both the story and codex that suggest that things are not what they seem, that we might not be properly seeing what is going on in regards to Valkorian/Vitiate. Like we are seeing what we want to see, but not actually understanding what is in front of us, much like Darth Marr suggests about not seeing the Emperor properly till it was too late. I personally love the KotFE story for how it challenges our player characters with this dilemma of question who they are and what they believe. My main that I have played with since launch is a Jedi Sage, that has never once choosen a dark side option. Until this expansion. I create little backstories for each character to kind of flesh out their personality and have the story impact that personality, and I made him very loyal to the codes of the Jedi, and in particular the Jedi Order even more so than the Republic, and everything that happens 1-50 story arc, all of it, didn't make him question his ideals or the Jedi Order, and even so into the whole Hutt Cartel and Dread Master story arcs. But starting a little bit with Shadow of Revan, I think he saw how the Order was not always perfect and had many of his peers, and friends who would easily leave it for a cause they saw more worthy, in Revan. And then seeing the destruction on Ziost and realizing how powerless he and his ideals really are. Then KotFE starts and his world is turned upside down, along with the rest of the galaxy, and he no longer has the Jedi Order as he knows it for help. And he refused Valkorian's power the first few times, but with his constant talking in his head, and him trying to appear human and reasonable, the minute Arcann kills you know who, and starts calling my character, "father" repeatedly, and says he "can't wait to meet all my friends" my poor sage, couldn't take it and accepted to use V's power. That was in my opinion one of the most crazy and memorable moments in the story, and one where it felt very engaging to be apart of. Until then my Sage had never faced the "no win scenario" before Ziost. And then to be confronted with another no-win scenario, with someone offering save the situation and all he had to do to win was just let him have his way for a little bit. It felt like everything in the character's story was leading to that point, and in a moment of weakness he choose poorly. There seems to be an overarching theme of destiny and identity in this expansion. Trying to escape fate or be more than destiny, while also question ourselves and those we know. So when Valkorian says "a mistake has been made but by whom" is what we should be asking ourselves.

I prefered the Dread Master story, even though it was locked behind operations it was a bit more interesting and in context the reason for the Hutts aggression on Makeb. For while they really felt like a big threat as every operation seemed to be connected to them or a result of their machinations. Oricon was also really fun. It is a giant shame that they were mostly locked behind operations as many players did not get to enjoy that story like I and others did. While I love how pretty and big Makeb is, I feel the story there is pretty awful especially for the Republic. The Imperial story is interesting, more so as an agent player, but isn't too exciting. Makeb is cool, just not as interesting as a story, and a way it would have been more interesting was if they made the direct connection that the power vacuum in the Hutt Cartel was due to the Dread Masters attacking the cartel and making them fearful of loosing their influence and power.

The reason I brought it up is that Sel Makor is a vital part of both the Sith Warrior and Jedi Knight on Voss, not to mention the Voss planetary story arc's finale revolves around him and the Nightmare Lands. When the Jedi Knight ecounters Sel Makor and he describes his power, it is literally everything we have seen Vitiate do. Plus the Voss Mystic calls him "Will with out a body" Valkorian talks a lot about the will to be greater and more. I do believe something is going on between both Sel Makor and Vitiate, I have no idea how Valkorian or Zakuul fits into this but after the finale on Yavin and then the Ziost story all I could think about was the earlier interaction with Sel Makor on Voss and how similar the two are. Valkorian feels worlds away from both Vitiate and Sel Makor, but there is something off about everything he says. And remember he apparently killed the old gods of Zakuul as their demon savior, that sounds familiar...

I think they could pull off an October/Halloween type event if they tied it in with one of the races/worlds created by Bioware for SWTOR. Like the Voss for example, their planet is orange and has a fall vibe to it, they have some creepy stuff happening in the Nightmare lands that could influence their culture to have a Halloween type event that is creepy and similiar. Both Republic and Empire have been trying to impress them so they could adopt the holiday. Or even better Zakuul being the active Galactic power could have an event dealing with one of their old gods, like Nahut or Zildrog. Zakuulans are said to have been very superstitious before Valkorian the Demon Savior showed up. And this works out well because one could see the Eternal Empire forcing both factions to celebrate their customs to stay in their good graces. And it would make sense in the larger canon because as time would go on and Zakuul eventually fade away as a galactic power people would be less inclinded to celebrate the holiday well before the time period the films take place. Anyways it would be fun, holiday events make MMORPGs feel a bit more alive especially if they change things up by having some areas decorated.

I would love a Rakata Prime stronghold, tropical beach, maybe some Rakatan Ruins along with ship debris to make like a mixture of ruins and crash ship places to decorate. I also LOVE the skybox in the Rakata Prime with the thunderstorm in the distance and the occasional lightning strike. My second choice would be Rishi, a tropical pirate slum stronghold or a Rishii village stronghold would be cool, and the day, evening, and night skyboxes for Rishi are all really cool too. Third choice would be Manaan would be fun to decorate an underwater stronghold and have some above water areas as well. Last choice would be Odessan, makes some sense, and I like the forests and mountians, I think it's a bit prettier than Alderaan.

I think it makes some sense to allow operations available to F2P/preferred players. However I would add the caveat that they can not roll "Need" on any item in the operation, only greed. This way people can still run ops with their friends or guilds, but if they do a PuG or join an operation with a guild that is mostly all subbed, then those who are paying for the game will get priority for drops. I would love more new operations, even though I am one of those players that does every aspect of the game equally. I run operations for progression, I PvP for fun and try the Arena Seasons, I play GSF often, I love decorating my stronghold, and making new outfits for my characters, I enjoy running the story missions, and flashpoints, and I enjoy crafting and playing the GTN/Economy, gosh I am having a blast leveling new characters for the DvL event even though I already have a lvl 65 of every advanced class. But I do sympathize with strict PvPers, and now Ops players who are in a content drought, hopefully there will be new operations and more PvP maps in the near future. But in the mean time I wouldn't mind if Operations were open to F2P/Pref players if they were not allowed to "Need" on items.

After reviewing the timeline again I think Vitiate changed his goals/plan/persona a very long time ago. Perhaps around the time he led the Sith back to Dromund Kaas. It would seem originally he planned to continue his conquest for immortality, after his ritual on Nathema. The voices, hands, children all crude devices to achieve such things. But I think he realized around the time they found Dromund Kaas the Sith ideology, and culture would never allow him to achieve his goals. All the infighting between the Sith and that the Sith feared his power but were jealous of it much like Arcann, he knew it would never give him the type of control he wanted unlike the Knights of Zakuul who worship him like a god. So he left them to find Zakuul a society with a blank slate where he could be seen as a god with his near immortality. He destroyed their panthenom of gods, and uplifted them from being nomadic tribes of people. Notice how Valkorian has been around for thousands of years and when we see him in the "Sacrifice" trailer he looks quite young. Something happened to make him start aging again. And I wonder if the whole Ziost thing was to stop that from continuing. But the destruction of Ziost wasn't the same as Nathema, it was a bit different from what how Scourge explained it in the Revan novel. Something happened during that time that we may have missed during the chaos. We also need to realize something happened on Voss, it's easy to miss on the SW story but part of his pysche and his voice was trapped there by an entity. We are never given a clear reason what exactly happened with him and Sel Makor but it was enough to cause concern for him and I bet is as important as what happened on Zoist. Before I speculate on that, I want to return to why Vitiate seems so different from Valkorian. The Sith Empire was useful and a means to an end for him, so he had to continue on acting in a way that the Sith would do what his voices/hands/children would do. All the while he was building up Zakuul. But as he says in chapter 2, "our flesh is not who we are". Seyna talks about a similar concept later that when she is a knight of Zakuul she is a knight and she is her when she is not. This explains why he was able to fall in love and be distracted at times. Most of the time when the SW, JC (through his "children") and the JK interact with Vitiate in the vanilla story those characters are just starting out, they are just random people to him, but as their story plays out they start to shape the galaxy, despite his influence and not because of it, the other classes indirectly do but obviously not in such a direct way. Back on Ziost Vitiate is constantly trying to get us off the planet, whether it is an act of mercy or respect or other plans he shows death of all things is not his only motive. I think Vitiate/Valkorian needed to preform one last world ending ritual to finish his plans, but he didn't posses the power to do so. Perhaps being tied down by controlling voices and children all over the galaxy weakened his ability, so he resorted to his hands and cult followers to try and do it on several worlds which the Jedi Knight stopped in their class story. We have to remember that the ritual and device crazed Revan did on Yavin was created by Vitiate himself centuries before, for all we know what happened on Yavin gave him the power to do what he did on Ziost alone. With his voice being destroyed and the Empire forsaking him and now finally on Ziost completing whatever it was he had been trying to do, there was no longer a need to play the charade of being a maniac sith. Which is why he then starts his initial plan of having a hidden empire attack the known galaxy. How that plays into the Outlander is yet to be known, I get the feeling he isn't helping us along because he had a change of heart, or because he wants order in the galaxy, but we can provide a suitable way for him to be "reborn" as he hints in Chapter 2. Darth Marr as a force ghost says this to Satele Shan in the expansion "Even when my life depended on it I did not see him properly till it was too late." If he is referring to his death in the Eternal Throne Room, what does this suggest? How is Valkorian just like our player character? In the way our player character is a Jed, Sith, Smuggler, ect. during their main story but time and circumstances changes them to be more or different, yet still the same character. Vitiate may be a Darth's title, but his name is Valkorian? "Being a Knight means everything. But I don't let it define me." - Senya

As everyone mentioned above the operations of Explosive Conflict, Terror from Beyond, and Scum and Villainy deal the most with the Dread Masters. The story starts off with Imperial Belsalvis Story Arc. Also there is minor story involvement about them in the Section X daily area, and the HK-51 quest/missions. So what you really need to know is that they have been causing trouble to both sides for a good while. Now while we are on the subject about the Dread War, does anyone know if the story of Makeb is connected to them somehow? I see how they were responsible for what happened in KP but was Makeb just an unintended consequence of that or did it tie into the larger story with them? Since Scum and Villainy had to do with them and the Hutts I wonder if that was the case with Makeb as well.

I would argue it is the over saturated MMO market that is one of the main culprits, the other problem are players like yourself. The MMO market is in limbo, with experimental MMOs not kicking off, and games focusing on more traditional elements like raiding also falling flat with consumers like WildStar. The issue is that there isn't enough "hardcore MMO players" to go around, and most of you act like a swarm of locust and consume content faster than it can be created and then once you are bored go hop on to another game whether it be brand new or an expansion to another MMO played before. MMO games are also having trouble keeping western audiences/consumers interested, so the problem isn't SWTOR it's a over saturated market and transient groups of players who consume content to fast and leave once they get bored. It will be interesting to see what happens when "next gen" MMOs like Black Desert and Star Citzen enter the arena if they can revitalize the market or just keep status quo.

The game is doing pretty great, as some have said all the servers have been pretty busy and there is plenty of new content for new or returning players. Once February swings around there will be even more new stuff and every month from then will have new story content and potential other content probably. Most of the complaints you are seeing are coming from the PvP community who rightfully so; are ready for new content. And the other frustration is from the less righteous cause of the operation crowd. Now I do love progression operations and enjoyed doing top tier PvE in this game but every MMORPG in the market is have trouble keeping up with content demands especially relevant new raid/ops/group PvE content. So I can't really blame anyone since no one seems to be able to do it well.

My theater showed a McDonald's commercial before the movie, like you op I feel every other food chain in America has failed and I will only consume McDonald's because of their vast superior marketing skills... I have never seen a video game trailer before a movie though so ya... I didn't expect any real ties to SWTOR and the movie, however it seems Star Wars: Rogue One has been filming in a tropical location similar to Rakata Prime...

Disney rarely gets gaming right, and when they do it's because they have outsourced the work to people who have the vision to make it work, or to other franchises. They dabbled in the MMO world with Toontown Online which was quite successful with the target demographic. Toontown for those of you unaware was Disney's first and only real success in the MMO market, it came out a year before World of Warcraft. It was quite innovated for the time and really was a great way to get young kids into the MMORPG world. It was also my first MMORPG. However the developers/imagineers at Toontown were responsible for many other Disney products and theme park attractions so that Toontown never got the attention it needed as an MMO after a few years. In fact it along with all of Disney's other MMO worlds (Pirates of the Caribbean and Pixie Hallow) closed down two years ago. Toontown before it shut down was plagued with hackers, hadn't seen a real content update in three years, and was left to slowly decay. So while I can't speak with any certainty or authority I feel very comfortable saying Disney probably won't return to the MMO world for a very long time. In fact I imagine Disney is probably happy EA and Bioware made SWTOR, they have a full fledged operating, working, MMORPG that they didn't have to spend resources on, promoting and hyping their newest media acquisition. And as someone else mentioned the MMO market is in limbo, with experimental MMOs not kicking off, and games focusing on more traditional elements like raiding also falling flat with consumers like WildStar. It will be interesting to see what happens when "next gen" MMOs like Black Desert and Star Citzen enter the arena if they can revitalize the market or just keep status quo.

The guy who does these reviews is also a WoW player. I laughed when he mentioned the combat not changing and being easy, he complained about that with WoW's last expansion. (He also gave WoW a 9.0 for their solo garrison time-traveling expac ) I find it funny how some people expect a MMORPG will magically change into a MMOFPS with an expansion or something to mix up combat.

They seem to have gone a bit to far with the nerfs. Doing regular content such as dailies and questing/story is for the most part one could say balanced now. That is of course if we ignore the fact that even at rank 50 companions are healing or damaging less then they would before patch 4.0 when fully geared. However the new alliance system focuses on the Heroic 2+ on the planets and it seems they still need some fine tuning. Some of the heroics needed to be fixed before this patch as well (looking at you Makeb), but since our companions were a bit over powered it wasn't a big deal. I have all the presence bonus, and have ar ank 50 companion, as well as being geared in full Exarch gear. And most of the Heroic 2+ past Nar Shadaa and Tatooine are a bit too time consuming compared to the heroics before them. Before this patch, I used my companions mostly in DPS roles as a DPS spec player, but now I pretty much have to use them as heals because the damage was nerfed so much. (And now they are sub-par healers which is silly too). What this will lead is players just sticking to the Heroic's from starter and capitol worlds only, and then selecting a few from the chapter 1 planets that are less time consuming. And if your concerned with over powered, level 65 characters can solo the heroics on starter planets with out a companion and not even wearing gear. Just shows you how much of a power difference both characters and NPCs have before and after level 30-35. So while this nerf didn't destroy companions or break the game, it is still not balanced at all, since in some cases the companions are back to being somewhat dead weight in several heroics and of course the heroic star fortress. I also personally think nerfing the DPS stance on companions as much as they did was unnecessary, perhaps lowering the critical chance so they weren't one shooting normal mobs in a single attack so much. We all saw a nerf coming, but I think it might be too much. There really isn't much difference between a lower level rank influence companion and one that is at rank 50. And to be fair, there wasn't much of a difference between rank 1 and 50 before this patch, but because the companions were again a bit too powerful it wasn't a problem. Perhaps a fix would be having a rank 50 companion be as strong as a rank 30 something companion before the nerf?

All I am implying is that tank and healing stances on companions make your game easier because getting a advantage like healing or defense tanking helps. As for them doing to much damage, I haven't seen them do anything too extreme and I got my T7 to rank 47. Before this update pretty much all companions were useless or dead weight with maybe Treek being the exception with it's versatility and being able to give heals as a tank. Now it would appear companions are all on the same level as Treek was before 4.0.

I think they finally balanced companions, before companions like Treek had 10x the amount of health at level 1 then my character did. Now Treek properly scales with my level and gear at level one. As we level so do our companions also become stronger, and more useful. Before 4.0 tanking and healing stances on companions were really underwhelming, even decently geared for example Treek in tank gear would die way to easily with out my sage using the discipline tree for heals. So now they actually tank and heal well at higher levels. Put Lana on DPS and don't heal her and she would die pretty easy in that fight. Try having your companion in DPS and if you are a healer or tank ignore taunts and heals to them and see how "overpowered" they are.

I think we can assume that in the chaos of chapter 1 our ship escaped with out being registered or linked to our character by Zakuul/Eternal Empire. By the time we see our ship again, it's been 5 years, a lot of time for it to not be linked to our character anymore. (Side note I would love a short story about the adventures of our ship and our ship droid, and Treek and HK-51, as it appears the last three stuck together all these years.) I imagine when we fly to Zakuul we have clearance codes to dock at a space station, and then use local transport to get to the surface, either by being smuggled in or just blending in. As for not being detected, I would argue that the part of Zakuul we visit is the underworld where the codex states Arcann and even Valkorian did not really monitor to allow enough freedom for the people to not rebel. So while we can be spotted the likelihood is low. (Personally I always wear my Kreia's robes on my Jedi and Sith when I go there for those recruitment quest, just to make it feel more real xD ). From what it appears, Zakuul has over taken the rest of the galaxy by force, but is managing it like a territory and not part of it's empire proper. Think of the Roman Empire and how it had outlying territories that were not completely under Roman authority or regulation. Same thing we see in the Galactic Empire in the movies on planets like Tatooine, where the Galactic Empire controls it but their presence is limited, and other powers like the Hutts rule the planet for the most part but they know who can or does ultimatly rule them, even if it is not formalized. So we can think of the galaxy being like it was for the rebels in the movies, except that there is more breathing space and freedom because the controlling empire of Zakuul does not have the logistical means as of yet, as the Empire from the movies did. Not to mention we have more sympathizers to our cause or to our characters based on their history. The Sith Empire still has Sith, the Republic still has Jedi, and neither have been demonized yet, so the general populace and the two factions may be weakened and indirectly under Zakuul rule, they as of yet have no reason to turn their backs on our characters and thus we can seem to freely travel around the galaxy.

I started to speculated that the Star Cabal was part of the Emperors plan after playing Shadows of Revan and Ziost Wondering if If Emp V. had mind controled a few key charismatic individuals to rally a diverse group of people to keep both of the main force sensitive powers at equal or less standing power. I remember some Star Cabal members emphasizing how each side needed to counter weight to it, not to mention for a group who wanted to "eradicate the force from the galaxy" they had no active plans of doing just that, I don't remember them having any plans to stop the force or force sensitives, just stopping both Jedi and Sith. The fact that a Voss and Rakata were apart of this group always felt weird. I do think something in the original SWTOR and maybe even KOTOR lead to this. The one thing that confuses me is how long Vitiate has been around yet, Valkorian seems "younger" although according to the Codex it seems he uplifted Zakuul to what it is today well before Seyna and his kids were around. I do feel like I am missing something.

Right click the SWTOR.exe or SWTOR launcher, go to properties then go to the compatibility tab, and make sure Windows Service Pack 3 is chosen. I had a similar problem with background NCPs and textures flickering till I changed that. Hope that helps!

I thought maybe it was a clever miss-directed title like "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones" where the title describes the end of the movie, so in the case "Star Wars the Old Republic: Knights of the Fallen Empire" refers to the Eternal Empire falling, including their knights? Could refer to Republic and Empire, but that quote of Lana Beniko on the website says: "they have all but fallen" so either they completely fall, or it's Zakuul/Eternal Empire falling. I am sure the title will make more sense then "Rise of the Hutt Cartel" They didn't even manage to rise above the atmosphere of Makeb.

Oh I see what you are saying, yea I hope for example we get nice open world areas like Makeb, and Rishi, or at the very least Yavin sized places to go to. I wouldn't mind if most chapters took place in special areas like the first few to help better tell the story. But yea some regular persistent MMO expansion areas would be nice too, and I would be both surprised and disappointed if they didn't add one or two of those types of planet areas in this expac.

Well that makes sense if I decide to stop the story and go to my stronghold or do dallies or something. I just hope we can play all nine chapters uninterpreted in a row, should we choose.

I am hoping the "Start Button" is only for Chapter one, and then any chapters after chapter nine. What they showed on stream and twitchcon of chapter one, this expansion starts out with the cinematic trailer then the "In a galaxy far far away..." and a Star Wars crawl, that we haven't seen since we first create our characters so I am hoping that is why it starts out differently than the other expansions. But if at the end of Chapter 1 or 2 where we are frozen in carbonate and the chapter ends and we teleport back to fleet or wherever so we can simply click the "Start Chapter 3 Button" that would be very dumb. I think that is what the OP and others are concerned about. Once we start the expansion it would be nice if we could keep playing through the story and not get pulled out of it unless we choose to leave and do something else on our own choice.

I can see it now, Darth Nox/Occulus/Imperius gets an alert that a unknown fleet is attacking, runs to his ship in fleet, trips on a mouse droid and falls in a carbonite chamber, only to be forgotten in the chaos. Seriously though, I can see the smuggler getting trapped in carbonite, heck even the agent might have personal reasons to do it on their own free will. But how in the world does it work with the other four?

So when does the solo rank queue pop most often? I sometimes spend time going through all the dallies on Yavin and CZ before it pops if I am lucky. lol