I've been a subscriber to The Old Republic off and on since two days after launch. Back when it came out my experience with MMOs was getting a character to 30 in DCUO in a weekend. The Old Republic was pretty much my first dive into MMORPGs. I won't sit here and claim it's been a flawless thing; I'd go so far as to say that the game wasn't all that good when it came out. I wasn't a huge fan of playing it, but I stuck around because of the friends I had made and the stories we told in our RP guild on our wonderful RP server. Since launch some quality of life elements have been added, the game has underwent fundamental changes in regards to UI, skill trees, gearing, and everything in between. Today was the release of patch 4.0 and the early access for the new expansion Knights of the Fallen Empire.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is an absolutely different game now.

Before diving into the contents of the expansion itself, it's important that some of the changes from patch 4.0 be brought to attention. With patch 4.0 The Old Republic has essentially become a single player game with a chatroom. Some might argue that it has ALWAYS been this, but it's especially obvious now.

-Main Stats are gone. There are 'eight' base classes in the game and for the longest the classes had a main stat to worry about when gearing. Strength, Willpower, Aim, or Cunning. This was in addition to the secondary stats like Endurance, Crit, Surge, or Power. The main stats have been rolled into one stat known as Mastery. How this will influence drops in dungeons I have no idea, especially since most of the drops in group content is adaptive gear to begin with - now when a chestpiece drops everyone can need it.

-Group Content is reworked. During your time on planets you often come across missions meant for a group of four people. These missions, called heroics in the game, have been changed to be done with two people. And by 'two people' they mean 'you and your A.I. companion'. It's not just the heroics that have changed, story heavy dungeons have been retooled so that you can do them in solo mode. Solo mode was introduced in the last expansion. You get a droid that is a one man raid team to run you through a flash point so you can experience the story without having to group up. Not every dungeon is a solo mode affair now, just the ones important to the overall story of the game. Which is the ones people care about anyway.

-Companions aren't special anymore. Every class has five A.I. companions that join you at various points in the game. (With two optional ones that can be purchased). These five companions all fit into a specific role. You had a healer, a melee dps, a ranged dps, a melee tank, and a ranged tank. Most players used their healer companion because why not. Now, however, every companion can do any role so now you can use your favorites. You want your beefy Force eating monster slave to stop tanking and heal you instead? Now you can. You want your tech savvy, hologram loving scientist medic to stop healing and tank for you? Fuckin' go right ahead. Now you're free to use whoever you want.

-Companions STILL aren't special. Gearing in an MMO is rarely fun. Gearing for an entire team is less so. In SWTOR there was always the guy who needed on a drop 'for companion' without asking. That excuse will no longer fly because companions don't NEED gear anymore. You can equip stuff on them for the sake of cosmetics, but their stats increase as you level and not with gear.

-Seriously, companions aren't important now. In typical BioWare fashion your companions respond based on your influence. You gain or lose approval and that gates their conversations/quests/romance. That's all gone now. Oh sure you still gain points with them, but now there's no direct number attached just a 'so and so approves' or 'so and so appreciates that' or straight up Telltale style 'so and so will remember that'. Rather than gating conversations, quests, and romances by how much they like you, now all that shit is unlocked as you progress in the questing process. So if you spent the whole game ignoring someone, just get to the end of your class shit and suddenly your companions will spill their story even if you don't want them to.

-Questing? Fuck that! Now that the new expansion is out, BioWare REALLY wants you to play it. So much so that they've changed the leveling process. Used to be that you went to a planet, did all the quests in an area (barring a heroic or two) and move on to the next area until you got bored or the planet ended. Now there are side quests which you shrug off and things known as Story Missions. These are the things you'll want to do and they consist of your class specific missions and the planetary questline for each planet. In essence: find the big purple icons and just do those missions. It's streamlined so you can just trim the fat and get the bare essentials all the way to 60.

Those are all fundamental changes to the game that make it easier to play. You really have no reason to group up for anything other than end game gearing/content now. But of course the main draw of the expansion is the new story known as Knights of the Fallen Empire.

Knights of the Fallen Empire feels like what The Old Republic should've been. When it opens, either with you rolling a freshly made 60 or your main character, it acts like a big fat undo button. Any previous companion or story or planet quests get cancelled, the Star Wars title crawl plays, and you're dumped into a series of events that revolve solely around you. It's all largely phased off. The focus is suddenly less on the civil war but more about you, the player.

Essentially the story is about this group called The Eternal Empire of Zakuul who shows up, fucks shit up now that the Republic and Empire are weakened from the LAST expansion, and after shit hits the fan you're frozen in carbonite for five years and, once freed, find yourself having to deal with this Eternal Empire now that there pretty much is no longer a Republic or an Empire. Right from the start this feels way more like a Star Wars story than anything The Old Republic ever had. The antagonists are appropriately menacing and cool sounding, the heroes might as well call themselves a Rebel Alliance for how outmatched, outnumbered, and untrusting of each other they are, and rather than embarking on a series of tangentially related events, you're wrapping yourself up in the conflict directly.

Dialog scenes are much more dramatic. In the base game the conversations were flat. Two people standing and talking with some canned ass animations and repeated dialog from the player. In KOTFE, the conversations are much more engaging to watch. Faces animate! Characters will move their eyes to emote naturally. The camera will actually move to match the action going on. The game will cut to characters in different locations relative to you and watch them converse. It feels like they're telling an actual story. You'll finish a mission and the game will cut to the antagonists being up to evil shit rather than having characters tell you how evil this person is. This is the type of thing that I would've expected out of a KOTOR sequel. Past choices will come up in conversation. Characters interact with each other. You've got your own faux-Normandy/Skyhold. This content FINALLY feels like something BioWare made.

The downside is that...there's not a whole lot of it. As it stands Knights of the Fallen Empire is releasing with nine chapters out of a planned sixteen. The chapters will release monthly starting next year. The chapters are not especially long and there aren't any side missions to do. There's really no exploration involved, either. The chapters mainly consist of one area with some instances. The content is so heavily revolved around the narrative and the parts between that are less interesting. I've got two chapters left and I only played about four hours. I'm not sure if there's enough at the endgame to hold my attention while waiting for the rest of the chapters to come out.

The narrative that's there is at least enough of a carrot-on-a-stick to keep you going and the new characters are absolutely more engaging than the companions of old.

Knights of the Fallen Empire brings some much needed...well..soul to The Old Republic. Cutscenes have life to them. There's an engaging story being told. It might not be Knights of the Old Republic 3 but god dammit it's closer than it's ever been to realizing that dream.

That sounds really awesome to me. I got back into SWTOR with Rise of the Hutt Cartel, but I couldn't see myself rolling any more characters without the 12X XP boost, so it's awesome to hear that they basically made the boost permanent.

The heroics stuff is great too, especially with an MMO that's 3+ years out - I just want to play it like KOTOR, dammit! The stories they wrote for each class are actually really good, but it was such a slog getting through it by yourself.

Downloading the patch right now, these changes sound pretty good and i've been reading some good impressions from other people. Hopefully this will breathe new life into the game!

The last thing I need is to become addicted to SWTOR again...

... but the Voice... he's calling my name...

Is this game playable f2p? It it's not I'll probably skip out.

Eh...it's not the optimal way. I'd probably caution against playing for free and suggest bumping to preferred.

@donchipotle: I think I am preferred since I bought the game when it initially came out. I just remember everything being behind a pay wall which caused me to stop playing.

Yeah that's still the case. Additional quickbar slots, customization options, more quality of life stuff...still behind paywalls for f2p.

Holy moly. Sounds like just the reason to go back and finish the quests of all 8 of my characters. I was basically treating it as one massive single-player game with a bunch of parallel storylines, though the group content was admittedly fun.

This'll be the second time I'm reinstalling it within the last week.

So you can really level up all they way by just doing the purple quests ?
I was thinking about going back but it was always the massive amount of side quests that killed my interest in the game, I think my highest level character was 37 or something.

I remember that children looked like dolls from a horror film in the Old Republic.

That is the official word, yes. Purple quests will be what you need to go from 1-60. So the class missions, the planetary quest chain, and a handful of story-heavier dungeons (now soloable) means the grind is all but gone. You'll still not be as fast as you would've when 12x exp was active but it'll be much faster than having to do everything.

@donchipotle: Thanks for sharing this! I went back a couple of months ago, but none of these changes were there and I burned out pretty quick. Still lots of silly stuff locked behind a paywall, like the ability to hide your helmet. I did spend some coins on most of the essential stuff, though.These changes seem worth checking out. I do like the story stuff a lot.

@donchipotle As someone who bought the game at launch for full price and hasn't played since about a month after that, are the benefits of being a "Preferred Status Player" good enough to play the game for free now? I know that's rather subjective, but I might actually give this game another shot if the F2P restrictions aren't too bad. I'm not interested in spending any money on anything.

I'm mainly concerned about things like having enough quickbar slots and inventory space, but any insights you might be able to give me would be helpful. Thanks.

@mike I know you didn't ask me, but here is the list. http://www.swtor.com/free/features

I also bought it at launch and one of the things that has kept me from playing for more than a few days (since it went F2P) is that is has tons of restrictions. I'm fairly certain quickbars are locked after a certain amount, but I never found it an issue with my level 40 something character. I think I was close to finishing the story on that character and also close to hitting the original max level cap. It's probably worth a try. The only thing I am worried about is that the Story based leveling that was mentioned in the original post is actually the same one they've had for a few months, which requires a subscription. I remember they were making a big deal about how they boosted the story xp for subscribers so that you'd never have to do a single side mission if you didn't want to and that sounds like the same thing described here. I thought about subscribing for a month and trying to do the story on all the classes I was interested in, but honestly...I'd rather just play Elder Scrolls Online or The Secret World rather than drop more money on monthly fees. I've been doing that since Anarchy Online came out and I'm just kind of done. Please let us know.

@mike: I haven't played in a while, but looking at the patch notes, it looks like they kind of reduced the number of items you need for crafting. I never did much gathering of crafting materials in game, that stuff can eat up inventory space pretty quick unless they changed it in this expansion. I used to fill up my pack with greens so I could break them down in hopes of getting the schematics for blues.

Loot was never really raining from the skies and I heavily favored using item modifications to upgrade items vs. loot drops, so inventory was never a huge deal for me. If I went out to a planet with an empty pack, I'd usually finish up that planet and still have plenty of room.

On the topic of quickbar slots, I feel that even as a subscriber, I don't have enough. However, I also feel like there's a -ton- of ability bloat and abilities that you'll use -very- sparingly. You'll just need to choose your skills carefully and sideline a few of those "oh crap" abilities.

You're no longer getting 12x experience for class missions but the Story Missions (identified in game now by a purple icon) give out more experience than they did before in order to facilitate them being the means for getting to 60. I don't know if that's a sub only perk and I can't imagine it would be.

I'm a subscriber and even I wound up running out of quickbar slots. So many abilities are useful for only certain specs/trees so it becomes a matter of slotting what you need for your class. Inventory might be a hassle but you can always send out companions to sell your junk items which can clear up space, and given the restrictions it's not like you''ll be gathering a whole lot of crafting mats which just eat up space. The F2P restrictions are there simply to entice someone to buy for quality of life upgrades. You have a limited amount of money you can carry, limited access to features like chat or the auction house, and even cosmetic limitations. I'd suggest someone play F2P only if they're interested in seeing the class stories since that's all you're going to be able to get without dropping fifteen for a month. Just doing the class missions makes a lot of the limitations non issues. Money is rarely an object, the content is much easier now, and it's more of a hassle but you can make quickbars work if you give priority to the most immediately beneficial skills. (You might not ever need your defensive cooldowns or heals, for example.) SWTOR's F2P model is not ideal. It still is more of a sample to get you to buy stuff. Given that the in game market boosted revenue that's not at all shocking.

Having now finished the initial nine chapters I think it's safe to assume that Knights of the Fallen Empire is the best expansion that has happened for the game and I see why BioWare wants you to get to 60 ASAP. Finishing the first nine chapters is like finishing a prologue. Now it's back to more of a dailies situation but with a much more interesting progression system involved. You're building up influence and allies by responding to requests from various characters. Some of these have involved old characters and some have involved totally new ones. It's far easier to gear up now; I got 5 of my 9 armor pieces after only about three hours of playing. You are able to just warp instantly to weekly/daily mission zones, don't have to turn in the weekly heroics to a terminal, and you can instantly warp back to certain characters at your headquarters which severely limits travel time and makes it way easier to get your gear. I'm kind of digging the hell out of the expansion.

So, I'm in the same boat as a lot of folks, in that I'm coming back to the game after a hiatus of sorts. However, I gave the game a shot about 6 months ago and hated it. I got about 10 minutes into playing a new character before I realized that I hated a lot of the old artifacts of thinking that were still evident in the game. By this, I mean traditional talent trees, and companions that you had to provide a full suite of gear to, in order to make them viable. It was awful and I uninstalled it immediately.

Fast forward to Tuesday, when I watched that damned new Force Awakens trailer. Hooked immediately. Star Wars is back! So I log onto the SWTOR site, and I see all of these new features, and man am I glad I gave it another shot. Just finished with the starting planet, and it feels like I've gone from Destiny 1.0 to Destiny 2.0, or from Diablo III vanilla to Diablo III Reaper of Souls. it's mindbogglingly different. It feels like an epic story instead of a patchwork MMO that is barely hanging on. My character feels powerful, I've got unique abilities by level 15 that used to be locked until level 40, my companions can change spec on the fly and feel useful!

TLDR; I'm back in this for a long time.

I've attempted to get back into this a few times now, but every time I do I'm just lost in terms of what abilities to use and how to engage with enemies in the game. I had a level thirty-something Jedi Consular healer who was using the lizard NPC as a tank, but it makes re-entering the game nigh impossible. I really don't want to start all the way at the beginning and replay those planets though.

@a_cute_squirtle: So this used to be a common problem, but it's been largely rectified. Your healer can easily become a ranged dps if you want, with minimal headache. Your companion can now fulfill any role you want, they've made them all capable of filling all three roles. They have also reduced the amount of clunk abilities that used to clog up your skill bars, so you can reduce your total skills to around 10 or 15.

So I just got back into this last weekend and as soon as you start Chapter 1 of Knights of the Fallen Empire it asks if you'd like to play in Tutorial mode. This strips down your skills much like Warlords of Draenor does for characters that boost to 100 allowing you to slowly learn your character. The abilities trickle in between each chapter I think (I didn't do this cause I'm a masochist) making it a much more pleasant experience for those coming back to the game after a long break.

I will say that the story in this is pretty great if you have had any vested interest in the SWTOR. My Jedi Sentinel's story continued immediately after the Ziost story and was pretty seamless. I was worried that I wouldn't like the new companions but after my 80's build montage complete with Scooby Doo chase sequence I was no longer concerned. For footage of what I'm talking about I'll just post the link for those that want to see it. It's pretty great. However this is not my character but the story plays out the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voiiy_6CdxM

Overall it wasn't a long story as I got through the majority of it within about 8-10 hours and much like the Ziost stuff the end game is fairly mindless and unfulfilling if you aren't doing operations. I believe their end goal though is to get people to witness the different stories so I'm looking forward to progressing my Bounty Hunter and Sage through their stories as well. I definitely think its worth the 15 dollars to sub if you have any interest in wanting to view this story. I think this is their way of rebooting the story of the game for people wanting to experience it without having to go through the somewhat awful leveling progression of the early game.

Is there a reason for me to play this when i can just watch all the story on youtube. I dont like the gameplay of the game and tried many times, but love the story.

@cooperb212: You've already answered your own question: don't play it. While 4.0 had a lot of positive changes to the overall game experience, the core gameplay is still the same, and this expansion's quests were a lot less fun to play than Rise of the Hutt Cartel's. Assuming you don't care too much about seeing specific dialogue choices, just watching it should be fine.

I don't mean to be a dick and not support a game or dev, usually i buy all my games even ones alot of people would watch instead of buying like the telltale games. I find playing always a better experience, but this is a rare game for me where i really enjoy the story lines as being a fan of star wars and kotor. I just never have gotten into an mmo usually its to much of a time investment and not as fun to play alone. I tried many from GW2, Wow, DC Universe Online, Rift. Never got into any of them.