What drove away the initial playerbase?

[Macetheace]

SWTOR, was extremely well loved, anticipated and and the launch had the numbers to prove - but then it all went to downhill after a a month or 2 .. why was that?

 

I'm curious, because this game is as good as wow in many areas, and also better in a lot, while worse in a few. They have some rather big issues, but in the large scheme of things even those are minor and don't quite warrant the down turn we observed.

 

It's also clear that many who played the beta, and the great crowd influx at launch, meant that they enjoyed the game, even with the flaws.. why did after a month..all of a sudden the flaws dominated the player boards, and a rather unwarranted and undeserved negative stigma arose around SWTOr.

 

Even to this day, in some quarters, you suggest SWTOR, and some old people will respond to you telling you it's a bad game, and you ask them why, they mention stuff that may have been true 10 years ago, but is not the case now .

 

 

 

It's the players what were bad mouthing the game, , and i don't see how it was so loved then all of a sudden not.. so it can't really be the engine - even though that annoyed a lot of people, and still does somewhat.. how did they get the bad rep, why ? and i wonder if it would change.

 

 

Face it, SWTOR is basically the great evolution of KOTOR , no one shoudl say they love KoToR and sneer at SWTOR, it is vastly superior game, much bigger and basically the adventure continues.. and yet, people praise KotoR often, but don't mention SWTOR.

 

KotFE, with it's flashy trailer, and dynamic new story, art etc, brought back a lot of players... but not all stayed.. I'm willing to bet this was for different reasons. I know many who came back, now complained about the ENGINE.. that was the bigggest issue in KotFE, meanwhile about a month or 2 after launch, it was end-game content.

 

 

SWTOR has theier 10 year anniversary, I wonder how much of htis game can really be restored if they make the right decisions.. and what it would take.

 

For me:

 

1. Major graphical update: especially player models, bestiary, and vehicles, also planet models and a revamp to all the fly in/out scenes

2. Engine update: The things that turned people away have to go, fix this and player will happily migrate from wow.

3. Great new chapter: You need to repeat the wonder of KotFE - that was an amazing relaunch, it stunned E3 with its trailer, and caught a lot of our attentions back

4. Ops/FP serious development, once the engine issues are resolved, you need to make this serious again. Even with half the volume of wow's raids/dungeons, I reckon this game can capture people back.

5. Cash shop needs to be more generous, when F2Ps come, and they will, they need greater incentives to sub, but not feel like they're being exploited. This can turn people off and it won't matter how great your game is. no one likes abusive or near criminal exploitation of their fanb ase. It's the wrong message. You can do better

 

 

but the guilds dwindled because the raid scene was too slow and not competitive enough. That must fix.

[OFAWFletch]

I agree but its all about the Cheddar, yo. Not about real good content anymore.

[xordevoreaux]

I agree but its all about the Cheddar, yo. Not about real good content anymore.

 

Doesn't serve to say "not about real good content" if you don't suggest what would be good content, thereby giving the devs something to work with. All they'd be doing is slapping more content on the wall to see what sticks, waiting for players to say "good" or "bad" (and, of course, those players won't agree).

 

So when calling something out as bad content, specify what you believe is good.

Edited April 21, 2021 by xordevoreaux

[Przemo_No]

There is only ONE THING that will bring mass of players back to this game:

 

MORE SEPARATE class stories!

 

This was (and still is) the unique and outstanding feature of this game - one that brought thousands of people to play and explore the game.

 

Because as of now the story progress is gated by extremely long and boring overtuned Mob-feast called "Spirit of Vengeance" where one needs minimum 40 minutes of their time to trudge across all those silver mobs (mind you bosses are way easier than mobs here!) to progress their story.

And if you happen to have many alts it becomes a nauseatic experience. I have to do this 38 times and I was bored after 3.

 

Thsi is the major issue of the game LACK of the content that made it so unique at the beginning!

 

I do not care about OPS, PVP anymore been there, done them, they're ok, but I see NO VALUE of repeating the same stuff over and over again...

Edited April 21, 2021 by Przemo_No

[Tashia]

no separate class stories -- the thing that made it different from all the others

[Pricia]

My experience - I love Star Wars, played the game at release. I quit when the game went f2p. Mostly though, I was bored - leveling new toons was painful (slow exp, lots of dying, being forced to do all side quests AGAIN to keep up with the zone level), and I couldn't even finish Ilum because you had to group to finish the story - I remember doing the first flashpoint and it was long and tedious and not fun and I just couldn't do that again because I had two toddlers. And did I mention that I hate grouping and loot drama?

 

Then last year I was bored and wanted to find a new MMO that I could play solo and someone suggested SWTOR on Reddit... At first I was like "no thanks, I tried it, loved the stories, but the game was too hard." I was told that it's completely different now and you can solo all the stories so I gave it a try and I've been having a blast.

 

That's the problem right there - people don't realize how much the game has changed. I don't know how people work but, for me, the first impression is key, and unless I stick to a game for a long time, usually when I quit I'm not really interested in going back - you have to relearn the game each time etc, and it's just not the same to come back to the story after 2 years.

 

I mean, I ended up leveling 23 characters and now I'm running out of new combinations to try out and I'm basically logging on to check the daily CM sale, gamble and lose money on cartel crates, and do Conquests. At least, for all its faults, the Galactic Seasons will give me a reason to log on until the next update...

[Damask_Rose]

SWtOR made a lot of mistakes early on.

 

For starters, they opened up way too many servers for launch. They didn't want anyone to wait in a queue. What they didn't factor in is that MMOs typically lose up to 40% of their early players when the month that comes with the box purchase runs out. So very quickly they ended up with a lot of light population servers. There was no server transfer, so if your server was too light for you to raid or pvp, you were sol unless you started all over on a new server. By the time they finally added in server transfers, they were already planning out the first big merger.

 

The issue with light servers was compounded by the lack of any type of group finder. If you wanted to do a flashpoint or a raid, you had to spam fleet chat. Since you were hanging out on fleet, you couldn't do anything else. It wasn't group content friendly. Add to that, there were only a couple of end game raids.

 

Then there were missteps with pvp. Ilum was supposed to be big, faction based lvl 50 pvp, but the game was too poorly optimized to support it, so it got yanked very quickly. I never got to experience it since I leveled too slowly After that there was the year long pre-season which alienated a lot of the pvp population. Season 1 kept getting delayed at the last second. When it finally launched it was arenas, which alienated another chunk of the pvp population.

[Drew_Braxton]

There are still lots of articles out there on the why. Lack of experience with MMOs, they way under estimated how long it would take players to crunch through stories, almost zero end game content, so many bugs and missing QOL items that it was absolutely laborious to do anything, open world and other event was absolute lag fest, etc. Once people started leaving the excess servers left the rest of us on near empty servers. There were mornings I would log in and be the only person on a planet and that happened alot before mergers.

 

As to your wish list most really are that. Its obvious that even with them backing away from anthem and that other game, there has been no evidence of increasing support to this game. No advertising, listed at the bottom of their website. They added another community person and its still hit or miss on real communication, roadmap, or what kind of support the game is going to get. Post after post of them logging yet more bugs, and very little real new content. I'm not saying the game is in maintenance mode, but it's more like operational on a mini staff with little support.

 

They would need way more support to update the engine or graphics. It's been done before. The MMO with the federation in it did that years ago and they are going strong....partially because they hooked a lot of german players and they are very loyal. They even rolled out versions to xbox and ps4. That takes support and money though. We haven't seen a real expansion in several years.

 

The new stories are doable with smaller staff. So that could happen if they decide to do it.

 

They could still do something with ops, but they chased so many raiders away years ago when they turned their backs on challenging operations. Not easy to bring people like that back or rebuild trust.

 

Cash shop might happen, but they have really made any moves to change ftp or preferred. Would be nice if they did some thing either get a bigger carrot for subscriptions or make the cartel market more appealing so people spend more money. I wonder if they ever benchmark their competition. That federation game I mentioned eliminated the subscription all together. The do have a life time one with perks, but other than that depend on the cash store. That game is going on 11 years and enough players to populate a pc, ps4, and xbox version. Not trying to compare games, but games are a life cycle. You either pump periodic life back into it with big updates or do things to keep people here to keep the population drops from swinging so much.

 

1. Major graphical update: especially player models, bestiary, and vehicles, also planet models and a revamp to all the fly in/out scenes

2. Engine update: The things that turned people away have to go, fix this and player will happily migrate from wow.

3. Great new chapter: You need to repeat the wonder of KotFE - that was an amazing relaunch, it stunned E3 with its trailer, and caught a lot of our attentions back

4. Ops/FP serious development, once the engine issues are resolved, you need to make this serious again. Even with half the volume of wow's raids/dungeons, I reckon this game can capture people back.

5. Cash shop needs to be more generous, when F2Ps come, and they will, they need greater incentives to sub, but not feel like they're being exploited. This can turn people off and it won't matter how great your game is. no one likes abusive or near criminal exploitation of their fanb ase. It's the wrong message. You can do better

Edited April 22, 2021 by Drew_Braxton

[xordevoreaux]

There is only ONE THING that will bring mass of players back to this game:

Advertising.

 

Without advertising, all the content in the world doesn't mean jack.

 

Full page ads in gaming magazines. Ad banners and gratuitous articles about the game splashed on every gaming site. Co-branding with other products. Displays in brick-and-mortar stores. Greater promotion on EA's own web site. SWTOR isn't on EA's home page. Not a featured game. Scroll to the bottom on EA's page where you see "Star Wars" on the list of latest updates. Click. NO SWTOR. Click Read More below that. NO SWTOR.

 

Advertising.

Edited April 22, 2021 by xordevoreaux

[ImmortalLowlife]

Lack of endgame content. A company whose known for some of the greatest single player story driven RPG's of all time decided to dip their toes into the mmo market and attempt to dethrone WoW. They quickly realized that unlike people who spend 100's of hours in a single player open world rpg, people who play MMO's rushed to endgame within a few weeks and found it lacking. And they left...

[Phazonfreak]

-Lack of performance

-Lack of endgame content

-Lack of basic features other games had

-Lack of engaging and modern combat mechanics

-Lack of bringing out new story content at a steady pace

-Lack of meaningful PvP in the open world

 

This was all compounded by the fact that they made a big mistake when choosing and developing their game engine. If there was a singular reason why the game failed, it is because of the broken mess they have created with it and that the current developers cannot untangle it anymore. Which also means that the only way they could potentially lift this game up again is by doing a fundamental engine rework.

 

FF14 would be the prime example of how something like this can be turned around. That game was a broken mess and scraped the bottom of the barrel when it first came out and they did a lot of work to make it one of the top Mmorpgs out there.

Edited April 22, 2021 by Phazonfreak

[foxmob]

I agree that a new or rebuilt game engine would make this game a lot better, but I don't think it will bring back all the players who left it years ago. that ship has sailed, my friend. swtor is what it is, at this point.

[Varlak]

Graphic quality was a major complaint even at day 1 of release. Shadow were bugged, even minor shadow could be the difference between max an lowest graphic setting.

 

Lets be real, this game did not even beat WoW graphic quality but required a stronger PC.

 

Then many just realized they didn't enjoyed fighting mostly against droids and alien races.

 

Also, we had all of the ex SWG players that hoped this game was its successor while it was just another traditional MMO, with a star wars twist.

[Macetheace]

Advertising.

 

Without advertising, all the content in the world doesn't mean jack.

 

Full page ads in gaming magazines. Ad banners and gratuitous articles about the game splashed on every gaming site. Co-branding with other products. Displays in brick-and-mortar stores. Greater promotion on EA's own web site. SWTOR isn't on EA's home page. Not a featured game. Scroll to the bottom on EA's page where you see "Star Wars" on the list of latest updates. Click. NO SWTOR. Click Read More below that. NO SWTOR.

 

Advertising.

For real? Not even on the company's site.. that's bad, kinda makes you wonder if they are serous. Another studio is developing a KotoR remake, if that hits it off, people will come to SWTOR, but if they find it's not up to par, they'll simply go with whatever the new studio does next.

 

Seems like the next 1-5 years can turn their fortunes about.

[Phazonfreak]

Then many just realized they didn't enjoyed fighting mostly against droids and alien races.

 

Never ever heard that complaint before. Quite the opposite, one of the main draws for the game from the very beginning has been that it was set in the Star Wars universe and not in the completely oversaturated fantasy setting with the typical orcs and elves.

Edited April 22, 2021 by Phazonfreak

[Macetheace]

Lack of endgame content. A company whose known for some of the greatest single player story driven RPG's of all time decided to dip their toes into the mmo market and attempt to dethrone WoW. They quickly realized that unlike people who spend 100's of hours in a single player open world rpg, people who play MMO's rushed to endgame within a few weeks and found it lacking. And they left...

 

Wasn't it wow that created that trend? As well as the let's ignore content and story, because wow hardly had any serious story, even when they tried, their effort was makeshift at best for all their claims to care about it, they enver restructured their game to make their sotry really come out as a mjaor part of hte package.. it was always auxilliary.

 

And becuase it was lucky enough to get so popular, and htere is some fortune, for all it's merit, it was overly successful, as it acme at just hte right time with just enough goodness to hit the hyper lane...

 

I reckon it established the trend of race to end game, becuse most of the swtor earlier crowd were WoW players, who frustrated with wow, had seen a better product.. but use to riading and end game content in the way wow does it, SWTOR initial content was lacking. Not entirely their fault, persay, no mmo in the early dyas has a serious raid content, they did an astonish job, twith a massive game to hold up to what was already a 7 year old MMO, with multiple expansions.

 

however if they had done their gamer research well, they'd have none the priority o the people who were playing. These guys expected Cataclysm type raids (MoP would launch later in 2012). That crowd had a lot of enthusiastic players rush to level 50 so they could dominate the new big game elite state in a way they coudln't in wow back then i knew a lot of players going SWTOR hoping to form the first power houses and be the leading guilds and players... just like in wow a decade ago, people use to go to new servers to dominate andl ead the servers because older servers already had an established hirarchy too difficult to break.)

 

So these guys ditched the pleasure of hte story and the entertainment value, to rush to end game adn claim those spots, only to find end game was barely existent and not properly developed at all, this incurred a massive backlash, that made it far worse than it actually was.. i mean you've probably skipped work/school, spent hours driven yourself, in the hopes to dominate the next king of hte MMOS, lookign tot he future, finally getting to end game and realsing that the scene is so poor, it means next to nothing - the loss, is made all the much harder because ofh ow fervently you played.

 

This happened to a lot of players, and i know a few that have hated SWTOR for that.. it's not really the games fault for their misplaced expectations and over enthusiasm that sorta backfired, but then it is. MMOs do have raiding as a major staple of hteir playstyle.

 

Whiles SWTOR offered new sides to the genre others hadn't with it's story telling style and smooth moves, the majority of it's early crowd were raiders, and once they got stung, they kicked up a stinking storm about it, this filtered into other communities creating a bias that put a lock on both new and old.

 

Their greatest asset, (being very similar to wow) was also their greatest achilles heel, because then people expected a very similar pace and staple of raiding to what wow had.

[lord-angelus]

Mistakes that were being made producing and launching the game.

 

1st mistake that ever made is choosing this pile of s***t that some people call an engine. Apparently, a senior executive who worked at that time pushed for this engine and get it accepted by the team. But he had also shares/board member on hero engine so as soon as Bioware got the engine he quits the BioWare and cashes out. So we left with this mutant beta version of an engine, causing problems even to this date. Lack of content, optimisation etc beingly a part of this.

 

Imagine İlum worked as intended.

 

2 - No End Game Content Whatsoever.

 

As long as stories are niche and nice all that matters is the end game content. People spaced all of the cutscenes, voiced dialogues etc to rush to end game content which happens every MMO. But BioWare wasn't excepting that. They thought, once a player finished a class story they will level, play another one. Which didn't happen. This is not a single-player game. People wanted to stick to the main class, which they will develop, progress, level over the years.

 

After people finished the content in 1 or 2 months, they asked what are we going to do? BioWare replied " play the other class stories, people told: we want an end game content, don't want to play the class stories, BioWare replied: "it's ok the unsub and come back later when there is content, this is a live-service game", people left and never to return.

 

Wow already perfected the raids, events, dungeons all kinds of end game content on that point, so people didn't swap over from Wow for an inferior duplicate version of a game. Imagine a Gods like raid released from the start, people banging their heads against the wall trying to beat up bosses like Izax and Nahut getting the world first.

 

Instead experienced players one-shotted EV-KP and left with nothing to do. No raid was in development / ready to release.

 

Imagine 8vs 8 rank pvp without engine problems with great rewards.

 

Imagine getting 2 events in hand ready to deploy when you saw an up-down in population to be released.

Now that would be a proper end game.

 

3 - Lack of Customisation / Lack of Add-ons

 

Well, some people don't like add-ons, some people do. Whatever you like or don't like, you can agree swtor offered no customisation to the character / UI / outfit / gtn etc. So everybody stuck with something they didn't like and left.

 

3 - Budget Spent Wrong Places,

 

They spent the money to voice actors to getting every dialogue to be voiced in the game. Hands-on best levelling experience in any MMO I've ever seen. But most people like in any MMO's wants to rush to the endgame and skipped all of it as I said. Without developing the end game, people left, the money dried up and now we have a shell of the budget, game event can't be alive without a cash shop. If they were introduced a cartel market from start, that would have been a good thing too. But without an even outfit designer you can't sell anything, can you?

 

4 - Lack of Experience

 

People had customisation issues: They said, it's your fault, even for İlum.

People had concerns for the end game: It's ok to unsub and come back later.

People raised their voice for lack of communication: Still, not resolved to this date.

 

There are more things to add but I think I covered the major ones. BioWare still didn't learn from their mistakes, released unfinished games such as Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem. Now I think, their only chance is successful a new Dragon Age or EA is going to pull the plug. They even give KOTOR remake to another studio.

 

What can be done about it? Nothing. BioWare had the rights to the biggest IP in the world, and they couldn't deliver. They tried to do a reset like Final Fantasy and they failed that with 4.0. What FFXIV did was a hard reset, complete overhaul of the game and it worked brilliantly. And before the story players don't agree with me let me tell you a quick recap of what Final Fantasy and Swtor delivered since the last expansion.

 

Final Fantasy brought 28 hours of main story playtime (voiced dialogues) with the release of expansion + 17 hours of extras. If you take a completionist single-player route it will take you 54- 148 hours of gameplay. And what did swtor brought? 3 hours max?

 

So before, you spam nonsense like "SwTOR iS a StOrY dRiVEN gAMe blah, blah, blah" or " PEoplE are FOR ThE STorY nOT, ENd GaME", this game can't even deliver the single-player story anymore, because believe it or not, people are enjoying the nice story, but they play once and move to the endgame or they move to the next game.

[Mongorr]

MMORPGs are mostly a thing of the past. Their big time is long over. Some are able to stay afloat, but many failed and are gone now. Edited April 22, 2021 by Mongorr

[Darev]

I think that one of the key problems at the start of the game was that it was around Christmas time and people were either buying it, or receiving it, as a gift.

For the kids who played KOTOR and KOTOR2 they looked it TOR as the next KOTOR...which isn't wrong...but it isn't right either. Not completely.

I imagine some parents bought it for their kids thinking it was a one time purchase.

Imagine their surprise when it asks for CC information. Many most likely said "no" and that was it. No more game.

 

The other issues already mentioned played big parts too.

 

But a sudden dramatic drop off in numbers after a 1-3 months...a big part of that was people saying "no" to the subscription fee.

[akdonkey]

There is only ONE THING that will bring mass of players back to this game:

 

MORE SEPARATE class stories!

 

This was (and still is) the unique and outstanding feature of this game - one that brought thousands of people to play and explore the game.

 

Because as of now the story progress is gated by extremely long and boring overtuned Mob-feast called "Spirit of Vengeance" where one needs minimum 40 minutes of their time to trudge across all those silver mobs (mind you bosses are way easier than mobs here!) to progress their story.

And if you happen to have many alts it becomes a nauseatic experience. I have to do this 38 times and I was bored after 3.

 

This is the major issue of the game LACK of the content that made it so unique at the beginning!

 

I do not care about OPS, PVP anymore been there, done them, they're ok, but I see NO VALUE of repeating the same stuff over and over again...

 

I agree that the separate stories were a plus. I have 61 alts. I can play the class stories over and over, but once I get to The Shadow of Revan where it all blur's into the singular story I cringe and even skip it. KOTFE and KOTET are the worst.

Once you hit OSSUS it's all what side are you playing and they are winning.... The original Class stories were a different side of the overall bigger story.

[Nickodemous]

Also remember the game was forced out early by EA and their investors. The game was not quite ready to launch. That certainly put the devs behind the 8 ball at the get go!

[Hadsil]

The friend who introduced me to the game left because they stopped doing Class stories. He didn't see the point to keep playing when every character gets the same story. As a personal matter I only care about the story of the game. I do not do PvP. I don't do uprisings or operations. I only do flashpoints that are part of the story. I'm not into the competitive part of the game. That's me. My choice. My taste. I can see how repeating the story over and over can get boring. Even in Class stories there are particular Planet stories I really don't want to do, again. However, I'm not storied out yet. I really do like the Fallen Empire/Eternal Throne story. Particular missions perhaps not, but the overall game of it I do.

[Macetheace]

I think that one of the key problems at the start of the game was that it was around Christmas time and people were either buying it, or receiving it, as a gift.

For the kids who played KOTOR and KOTOR2 they looked it TOR as the next KOTOR...which isn't wrong...but it isn't right either. Not completely.

I imagine some parents bought it for their kids thinking it was a one time purchase.

Imagine their surprise when it asks for CC information. Many most likely said "no" and that was it. No more game.

 

The other issues already mentioned played big parts too.

 

But a sudden dramatic drop off in numbers after a 1-3 months...a big part of that was people saying "no" to the subscription fee.

 

I think there is an element here.

 

there were two major groups that influxed to SWTOR, which gave it the potential to blow wow out of the water.

 

Group 1 - were the hardcore and MMO fanbase, many of whom had played wow, which was showing it's age and issues - these guys are the ones that rush to end game and space bar through everything, because wow' structure had created that sort of scene and format for MMOs, and since SWTOR largely mirrored that format, these guys expected the same and were grossly disappointed to have and end game and sustainable progression path that was already well oiled in wow, barely existent in SWWTOR, and the devs could have stepped in with huge promises for the future, but sadly kept quiet, we now know why, most of them were losing their jobs - EA did not intend to develop this like Blizzard developed wow.

 

Group 2: These are the people that played KoToR, play single games, Ps, an entire market sector that the previous success of KoToR and the Star Wars franchise could actually bring to the game. But most of these did not accept SWTOR because of the subscription fees, it's why they never took to games like WoW, or EQ no matter what the hype, but these were a key group BW were hoping to attract.

 

I think this group genuinely enjoyed the game if they subscribed, but like you mention, I think a good few just refused outright, and those that did, played on, but when the servers became ghost, it made playing untenable.

 

 

The shift to F2P was a smart move, but if they had managed all of this process better, they would never have needed to and would rule the roost.

 

It's ironic, that the game did not fail because of it's content, nor because of it's story line or voice acting, it's combat style and gameplay structure, it was not properly supported for it's genre in time to keep it's crowd and capitalise on the major influx being a Star Wars title and KotoR would

 

Face it, Group 1 needed raids and end game to come a lot sooner, group 2 - did not find it compelling enough to stay subscribed for long once the community fell apart, and such balked at having to pay subscriptions, but they'd have paid if hte community was going great.

 

 

i also agree that QoL things didn't happen fast enough.. you see, these things wouldn't matter to KotoR players or new video game players to MMOs playing this because it's a star wars, they wouldn't know, but a sizeable portion of the initial community were wow players... and they expected certain qoL essential for an MMO that they didn't get, or at least not soon enough, and bailed before bringing a lot of bad user press that I found unjustified and unfair - but I understood, they were pissed off, however it was enough.

 

If the devs had really pulled together in those 1st 6 months to sort out community issues, QoL problems, and end game they could have steadied the ship and it would have lifted off to uncatchable.. and it would have been nice to see wow have serious competition.. long term rather than for the first 1-2 months

[Varlak]

Never ever heard that complaint before. Quite the opposite, one of the main draws for the game from the very beginning has been that it was set in the Star Wars universe and not in the completely oversaturated fantasy setting with the typical orcs and elves.

 

I did not meant that it was a bad thing. But many players who pre-ordered the game were just looking for a new MMO and came from traditional MMO (Everquest, WoW, UO).

 

Many of those players weren't really in the galaxy theme mood so they quitted.

 

But their is a lot of people who came here for the space theme.

[foxmob]

The friend who introduced me to the game left because they stopped doing Class stories. He didn't see the point to keep playing when every character gets the same story

 

that's a very good point. the thing that BW is by far the best at is/was story. it's the only "game play" area that SWTOR beats WoW in. TOR has more convenience perks and so forth, but in terms of actual game play, it's the tie-in between activities and story. and after the vanilla stories are wrapped up, it's all very generic.